{"title":"Dynamic binding of visual features by neuronal/stimulus synchrony.","authors":"A Iwabuchi","doi":"10.2114/jpa.17.97","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>When people see a visual scene, certain parts of the visual scene are treated as belonging together and we regard them as a perceptual unit, which is called a \"figure\". People focus on figures, and the remaining parts of the scene are disregarded as \"ground\". In Gestalt psychology this process is called \"figure-ground segregation\". According to current perceptual psychology, a figure is formed by binding various visual features in a scene, and developments in neuroscience have revealed that there are many feature-encoding neurons, which respond to such features specifically. It is not known, however, how the brain binds different features of an object into a coherent visual object representation. Recently, the theory of binding by neuronal synchrony, which argues that feature binding is dynamically mediated by neuronal synchrony of feature-encoding neurons, has been proposed. This review article portrays the problem of figure-ground segregation and features binding, summarizes neurophysiological and psychophysical experiments and theory relevant to feature binding by neuronal/stimulus synchrony, and suggests possible directions for future research on this topic.</p>","PeriodicalId":79317,"journal":{"name":"Applied human science : journal of physiological anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"1998-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2114/jpa.17.97","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Applied human science : journal of physiological anthropology","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2114/jpa.17.97","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
When people see a visual scene, certain parts of the visual scene are treated as belonging together and we regard them as a perceptual unit, which is called a "figure". People focus on figures, and the remaining parts of the scene are disregarded as "ground". In Gestalt psychology this process is called "figure-ground segregation". According to current perceptual psychology, a figure is formed by binding various visual features in a scene, and developments in neuroscience have revealed that there are many feature-encoding neurons, which respond to such features specifically. It is not known, however, how the brain binds different features of an object into a coherent visual object representation. Recently, the theory of binding by neuronal synchrony, which argues that feature binding is dynamically mediated by neuronal synchrony of feature-encoding neurons, has been proposed. This review article portrays the problem of figure-ground segregation and features binding, summarizes neurophysiological and psychophysical experiments and theory relevant to feature binding by neuronal/stimulus synchrony, and suggests possible directions for future research on this topic.