Similar electrophysiological correlates of texture segregation induced by luminance, orientation, motion and stereo

Abstract

Certain local features induce preattentive texture segregation. Recently, components in the visual evoked potential (VEP) associated with preattentive texture segregation (tsVEPs) have been demonstrated. To assess the similarity and dissimilarity of visual processing across visual dimensions, we compared VEPs and tsVEPs in texture segregation by luminance, orientation, motion and stereo disparity. We found tsVEPs across these four visual dimensions to be remarkably similar when compared to the "low-level" VEPs. The tsVEPs were always negative; their implicit time, peak latency and amplitude were (in msec/msec/microV): 91/234/-5.7, luminance; 84/257/-3.9, orientation; 80/295/-8.3, motion; and 95/310/-5.0 for stereo. The cross-correlation function, as a quantitative measure for similarity, on average was higher for the tsVEPs by a factor of 4.2 as compared to the low-level VEPs (P < 0.0001). The results suggest (1) that the tsVEPs represent activity of neural mechanisms that have generalised to some degree across visual dimensions; and (2) that these hypothetical generalisation mechanisms might exist already in the primary visual cortex.