Correlates of Perceptual Orientation Biases in Human Primary Visual Cortex.

Vision can be considered as a process of probabilistic inference. In a Bayesian framework, perceptual estimates from sensory information are combined with prior knowledge, with a stronger influence of the prior when the sensory evidence is less certain. Here, we explored the behavioral and neural consequences of manipulating stimulus certainty in the context of orientation processing.

A bias-free measure of the tilt illusion.

The perceived orientation of a central test grating is influenced by the orientation structure of the surrounding image. Measurement of this "tilt illusion" traditionally requires subjects to report the orientation of the test relative to a cardinal reference (e.g.

fMRI Activity in Posterior Parietal Cortex Relates to the Perceptual Use of Binocular Disparity for Both Signal-In-Noise and Feature Difference Tasks.

Visually guided action and interaction depends on the brain's ability to (a) extract and (b) discriminate meaningful targets from complex retinal inputs. Binocular disparity is known to facilitate this process, and it is an open question how activity in different parts of the visual cortex relates to these fundamental visual abilities. Here we examined fMRI responses related to performance on two different tasks (signal-in-noise "coarse" and feature difference "fine" tasks) that have been widely used in previous work, and are believed to differentially target the visual processes of signal extraction and feature discrimination.