Ventral extra-striate cortical areas are required for human visual texture segmentation.

A patient (HJA) with bilateral occipital lobe damage to ventral cortical areas V2, V3 and V4 was tested on a texture segmentation task involving texture bar detection in an array of oriented lines. Performance detecting a target shape was assessed as the orientations of the background lines had increasing orientation noise. Control participants found the task easier when the background lines had the same orientation or only slightly shifted in orientation.