July 2013
Volume 13, Issue 9
Free
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   July 2013
Object sensitivity in subcortical nuclei and their functional connections with cortical areas
Author Affiliations
  • Lan Wang
    State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
  • Zhentao Zuo
    State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
  • Peng Zhang
    State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
  • Sheng He
    State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China\nDepartment of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America
Journal of Vision July 2013, Vol.13, 498. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/13.9.498
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    • Get Citation

      Lan Wang, Zhentao Zuo, Peng Zhang, Sheng He; Object sensitivity in subcortical nuclei and their functional connections with cortical areas. Journal of Vision 2013;13(9):498. https://doi.org/10.1167/13.9.498.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Behaviors from blindsight patients as well as studies using interocular suppression suggest that the human subcortical pathway might be capable of processing object category information. Using functional MRI, we investigated subcortical response properties as well as functional connectivity patterns during object perception. During the experiment, subjects viewed objects from four different categories (tools, faces, phase-scrambled tools, phase-scrambled faces). Luminance and RMS contrast were matched for different stimuli. fMRI activity in the SC and LGN showed stronger responses to intact objects than to scrambled objects. We also performed granger causality analyses to investigate the functional connectivity of these subcortical regions with cortical regions underlying visual object processing. Preliminary results suggested a number of interesting connection patterns for different subcortical nuclei. For example, the left and right SC might have different connection patterns during object perception: although left SC showed more robust object sensitivity in terms of response amplitude, its signal was not related to responses in cortical areas; whereas right SC showed more correlation with responses in cortical areas, including both the parietal and fusiform areas. Thus we found object sensitivity in some subcortical structures, such as the SC and LGN. Preliminary results showed that subcortical nuclei might have differential patterns of communication with cortical regions during object information processing.

Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013

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