TY - JOUR
T1 - Inversion of pop-out for a distracting feature dimension in monkey visual cortex
AU - Klink, P. Christiaan
AU - Teeuwen, Rob R. M.
AU - Lorteije, Jeannette A. M.
AU - Roelfsema, Pieter R.
N1 - Funding Information: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank Kor Brandsma, Anneke Ditewig, and Lex Beekman for animal care and biotechnical assistance; Bram van Vugt and Pia Jentgens for assistance with data acquisition and animal training; Matthew Self for graciously allowing us to photograph his “alternatively organized” desk for the scene depicted in Fig. 1; and Jan Theeuwes and Daniël Schreij for early discussions of the work. The in-house experimental control software was originally developed by Chris van der Togt. This work was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO; Crossover Program 17619 “INTENSE”; VENI 451.13.023), the European Union FP7 (ERC 339490 “Cortic_al_gorithms”), the Human Brain Project (Agreement No. 945539, “Human Brain Project SGA3”), and the Friends Foundation of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
PY - 2023/2/28
Y1 - 2023/2/28
N2 - During visual search, it is important to reduce the interference of distracting objects in the scene. The neuronal responses elicited by the search target stimulus are typically enhanced. However, it is equally important to suppress the representations of distracting stimuli, especially if they are salient and capture attention. We trained monkeys to make an eye movement to a unique "pop-out" shape stimulus among an array of distracting stimuli. One of these distractors had a salient color that varied across trials and differed from the color of the other stimuli, causing it to also pop-out. The monkeys were able to select the pop-out shape target with high accuracy and actively avoided the pop-out color distractor. This behavioral pattern was reflected in the activity of neurons in area V4. Responses to the shape targets were enhanced, while the activity evoked by the pop-out color distractor was only briefly enhanced, directly followed by a sustained period of pronounced suppression. These behavioral and neuronal results demonstrate a cortical selection mechanism that rapidly inverts a pop-out signal to "pop-in" for an entire feature dimension thereby facilitating goal-directed visual search in the presence of salient distractors.
AB - During visual search, it is important to reduce the interference of distracting objects in the scene. The neuronal responses elicited by the search target stimulus are typically enhanced. However, it is equally important to suppress the representations of distracting stimuli, especially if they are salient and capture attention. We trained monkeys to make an eye movement to a unique "pop-out" shape stimulus among an array of distracting stimuli. One of these distractors had a salient color that varied across trials and differed from the color of the other stimuli, causing it to also pop-out. The monkeys were able to select the pop-out shape target with high accuracy and actively avoided the pop-out color distractor. This behavioral pattern was reflected in the activity of neurons in area V4. Responses to the shape targets were enhanced, while the activity evoked by the pop-out color distractor was only briefly enhanced, directly followed by a sustained period of pronounced suppression. These behavioral and neuronal results demonstrate a cortical selection mechanism that rapidly inverts a pop-out signal to "pop-in" for an entire feature dimension thereby facilitating goal-directed visual search in the presence of salient distractors.
KW - V4
KW - enhancement
KW - monkey
KW - suppression
KW - visual search
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85148550025&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2210839120
DO - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2210839120
M3 - Article
C2 - 36812207
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 120
SP - e2210839120
JO - PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
JF - PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
IS - 9
M1 - e2210839120
ER -