Spatial contextual effects in primary visual cortex limit feature representation under crowding

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 11; no. 1; p. 1687
• Main Authors: Henry, Christopher A., Kohn, Adam
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 03-04-2020; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 631/378/116/2394; 631/378/2613/1875; 631/378/2613/2615; 631/378/2649/1723; Action Potentials - physiology; Adult; Animals; Attention; Crowding; Crowding - psychology; Discrimination, Psychological - physiology; Electrodes, Implanted; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Macaca fascicularis; Male; Middle Aged; Monkeys; Monkeys & apes; multidisciplinary; Orientation behavior; Orientation, Spatial - physiology; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Photic Stimulation; Populations; Psychometrics; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Stereotaxic Techniques - instrumentation; Visual cortex; Visual Cortex - physiology; Visual effects; Visual stimuli; Visual system
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15386-7

Crowding is a profound loss of discriminability of visual features, when a target stimulus is surrounded by distractors. Numerous studies of human perception have characterized how crowding depends on the properties of a visual display. Yet, there is limited understanding of how and where stimulus information is lost in the visual system under crowding. Here, we show that macaque monkeys exhibit perceptual crowding for target orientation that is similar to humans. We then record from neuronal populations in monkey primary visual cortex (V1). These populations show an appreciable loss of information about target orientation in the presence of distractors, due both to divisive and additive modulation of responses to targets by distractors. Our results show that spatial contextual effects in V1 limit the discriminability of visual features and can contribute substantively to crowding.
Visual crowding can strongly limit perceptual discriminability, yet its neural basis remains unclear. Here, the authors show that perceptual crowding is similar in monkeys and humans, and that feature encoding in neuronal populations in primary visual cortex is limited for displays inducing crowding.