Visual synchrony affects binding and segmentation in perception

Marius Usher () and Nick Donnelly
Additional contact information
Marius Usher: University of Kent at Canterbury
Nick Donnelly: University of Kent at Canterbury

Nature, 1998, vol. 394, issue 6689, 179-182

Abstract: Abstract The visual system analyses information by decomposing complex objects into simple components (visual features) that are widely distributed across the cortex1,2. When several objects are present simultaneously in the visual field, a mechanism is required to group (bind) together visual features that belong to each object and to separate (segment) them from features of other objects. An attractive scheme for binding visual features into a coherent percept consists of synchronizing the activity of their neural representations3,4,5,6. If synchrony is important in binding, one would expect that binding and segmentation are facilitated by visual displays that are temporally manipulated to induce stimulus-dependent synchrony. Here we show that visual grouping is indeed facilitated when elements of one percept are presented at the same time as each other and are temporally separated (on a scale below the integration time of the visual system7) from elements of another percept or from background elements. Our results indicate that binding is due to a global mechanism of grouping caused by synchronous neural activation, and not to a local mechanism of motion computation.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/BF28166 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:394:y:1998:i:6689:d:10.1038_28166

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/28166

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().