Feedback from higher to lower visual areas for visual recognition may be weaker in the periphery: Glimpses from the perception of brief dichoptic stimuli

Eye movements bring attended visual inputs to the center of vision for further processing. Thus, central and peripheral vision should have different functional roles. Here, we use observations of visual perception under dichoptic stimuli to infer that there is a difference in the top-down feedback from higher brain centers to primary visual cortex. Visual stimuli to the two eyes were designed such that the sum and difference of the binocular input from the two eyes have the form of two different gratings. These gratings differed in their motion direction, tilt direction, or color, and duly evoked ambiguous percepts for the corresponding feature. Observers were more likely to perceive the feature in the binocular summation rather than the difference channel. However, this perceptual bias towards the binocular summation signal was weaker or absent in peripheral vision, even when central and peripheral vision showed no difference in contrast sensitivity to the binocular summation signal relative to that to the binocular difference signal. We propose that this bias can arise from top-down feedback as part of an analysis-by-synthesis computation. The feedback is of the input predicted using prior information by the upper level perceptual hypothesis about the visual scene; the hypothesis is verified by comparing the feedback with the actual visual input. We illustrate this process using a conceptual circuit model. In this framework, a bias towards binocular summation can arise from the prior knowledge that inputs are usually correlated between the two eyes. Accordingly, a weaker bias in the periphery implies that the top-down feedback is weaker there. Testable experimental predictions are presented and discussed

On Arousal and the Internal Regulation of Brain Function: Theory and Evidence across Modalities and Species

The brain is an organ. It is subject to the same physiological regulatory processes that engage the rest of the body’s organs, sculpted over hundreds of millions of years to sustain life so effectively. The central message of this thesis is that the holistic functioning of the brain, rather than operating at some level above or independent from these systemic regulatory processes, is deeply related to them. In short, as our limited attention spans might suggest: brain function is internally regulated. I propose that this internal regulation is a primary function of intrinsic brain activity. Chapter 2 provides a theoretical treatment of this issue, recasting intrinsic activity as an internal regulatory process operating on the brain’s temporal “states” and spatial “networks”. After establishing this framework, Chapters 3 and 4 provide tests of specific predictions. Thus, Chapter 3 confirms, in humans and macaque monkeys, the presence of topographically organized traveling waves occurring in synchrony with ongoing arousal fluctuations, with propagation occurring in parallel within the neocortex, striatum, thalamus, and cerebellum. This process is argued to provide a heretofore lacking physiological account of “resting-state functional connectivity” and related phenomenology. Chapter 4 extends this observation by demonstrating a continuous and tightly coordinated temporal evolution of brain, body, and behavioral states along a latent arousal cycle. Across multiple recording techniques and species, this cyclic trajectory is shown to be coupled to the traveling wave process described in Chapter 3, thus providing a parsimonious and integrative account of intrinsic brain activity and its spatiotemporal dynamics. Taken together, this thesis argues for the existence of an intrinsic regulatory process for global brain function