New Research: The Visual Perception of the Brain

Rebecca Lewis February 04, 2013

In a report published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists studied the two major brain areas involved in processing visual information – particularly those involved in our perception of shape and orientation.

A team of researchers from Department of Psychology at York and the Bradford School of Optometry & Vision Science found that the two neighbouring areas of the cortex (identified as LO1 and LO2) process visual information independently. Through the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) equipment, they looked at how these two brain regions work by disrupting their normal neural activities.

Scientists found that one area specifically processes orientation while the other area focuses on perceiving shape.

According to Tony Morland, a psychology professor at York, looking at the fMRI alone can’t tell what causal roles different areas play in an individual’s perception. It is only by disrupting the neural activity that the team was able to land on their conclusion.

One of the researchers, Dr Declan McKeefry from Bradford School of Optometry and Vision Science, said that the brain scanning technology along with the magnetic neuro-stimulation techniques provided a powerful means of studying the workings of a living human brain.

New light to the science of visual processing

They noted that in the past, neuropsychologists studied functions of the brain by examining people with permanent disruptions in certain brain areas due to injury. However, this method prevents the smaller yet significant areas to be understood. By applying small amount of magnetic fields in the smaller areas of the cortex, the researchers saw impairment in the subjects’ orientation abilities. Meanwhile, a disruption in the neural activity only affected their ability to perceive shapes.

McKeefry said their work shows how different aspects of visual information, in this case – orientation and shape perception, take place in different brain areas that lie side by side. One big challenge however, is to study how information is combined across these areas and other brain areas, and how it ultimately leads to object recognition. Nevertheless, their study is but another giant leap towards understanding the complex nature of how the brain processes visual information.

Source of this article:

Specialized and independent processing of orientation and shape in visual field maps LO1 and LO2