Non‐uniform phase sensitivity in spatial frequency maps of the human visual cortex

Just as a portrait painting can come from a collection of coarse and fine details, natural vision can be decomposed into coarse and fine components. Previous studies have shown that the early visual areas in the brain represent these components in a map‐like fashion. Other studies have shown that these same visual areas can be sensitive to how coarse and fine features line up in space. We found that the brain actually jointly represents both the scale of the feature (fine, medium, or coarse) and the alignment of these features in space. The results suggest that the visual cortex has an optimized representation particularly for the alignment of fine details, which are crucial in understanding the visual scene.