Abstract
When a featureless achromatic target is placed on a textured pattern and steadily viewed in peripheral vision, after a few seconds it seems to fill-in with the surrounding texture, similar to the experience of patients with scotomas from damage to the visual pathways. Such texture filling-in is thought to occur in early visual cortex, but the neural signals associated with texture filling-in of artificial scotomas in humans have not been fully explored. Here we used functional MRI to show that texture filling-in reflects retinotopically specific reductions in activity in human V1 and V2, accompanied by persistent signals associated with the invisible target.