Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 23, Issue 7, Pages 1618-1629Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhs149
Keywords
fMRI; oblique effect; orientation; primary visual cortex; radial bias
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Funding
- Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) [18020033, 20020033]
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) [20300114]
- RIKEN Brain Science Institute
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [18020033, 25242079, 20300114, 20020033] Funding Source: KAKEN
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Cells in the animal early visual cortex are sensitive to contour orientations and form repeated structures known as orientation columns. At the behavioral level, there exist 2 well-known global biases in orientation perception (oblique effect and radial bias) in both animals and humans. However, their neural bases are still under debate. To unveil how these behavioral biases are achieved in the early visual cortex, we conducted high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments with a novel continuous and periodic stimulation paradigm. By inserting resting recovery periods between successive stimulation periods and introducing a pair of orthogonal stimulation conditions that differed by 90 degrees continuously, we focused on analyzing a blood oxygenation level-dependent response modulated by the change in stimulus orientation and reliably extracted orientation preferences of single voxels. We found that there are more voxels preferring horizontal and vertical orientations, a physiological substrate underlying the oblique effect, and that these over-representations of horizontal and vertical orientations are prevalent in the cortical regions near the horizontal- and vertical-meridian representations, a phenomenon related to the radial bias. Behaviorally, we also confirmed that there exists perceptual superiority for horizontal and vertical orientations around horizontal and vertical meridians, respectively. Our results, thus, refined the neural mechanisms of these 2 global biases in orientation perception.
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