Bottlenecks of motion processing during a visual glance: the leaky flask model

YesWhere do the bottlenecks for information and attention lie when our visual system processes incoming stimuli? The human visual system encodes the incoming stimulus and transfers its contents into three major memory systems with increasing time scales, viz., sensory (or iconic) memory, visual short-term memory (VSTM), and long-term memory (LTM). It is commonly believed that the major bottleneck of information processing resides in VSTM. In contrast to this view, we show major bottlenecks for motion processing prior to VSTM. In the first experiment, we examined bottlenecks at the stimulus encoding stage through a partial-report technique by delivering the cue immediately at the end of the stimulus presentation. In the second experiment, we varied the cue delay to investigate sensory memory and VSTM. Performance decayed exponentially as a function of cue delay and we used the time-constant of the exponential-decay to demarcate sensory memory from VSTM. We then decomposed performance in terms of quality and quantity measures to analyze bottlenecks along these dimensions. In terms of the quality of information, two thirds to three quarters of the motion-processing bottleneck occurs in stimulus encoding rather than memory stages. In terms of the quantity of information, the motion-processing bottleneck is distributed, with the stimulus-encoding stage accounting for one third of the bottleneck. The bottleneck for the stimulus-encoding stage is dominated by the selection compared to the filtering function of attention. We also found that the filtering function of attention is operating mainly at the sensory memory stage in a specific manner, i.e., influencing only quantity and sparing quality. These results provide a novel and more complete understanding of information processing and storage bottlenecks for motion processing.Supported by R01 EY018165 and P30 EY007551 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Altered contextual modulation of primary visual cortex responses in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is typically associated with higher-level cognitive symptoms, such as disorganized thoughts, delusions, and hallucinations. However, deficits in visual processing have been consistently reported with the illness. Here, we provide strong neurophysiological evidence for a marked perturbation at the earliest level of cortical visual processing in patients with paranoid schizophrenia. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and adapting a well-established approach from electrophysiology, we found that orientation-specific contextual modulation of cortical responses in human primary visual cortex (V1)-a hallmark of early neural encoding of visual stimuli-is dramatically reduced in patients with schizophrenia. This indicates that contextual processing in schizophrenia is altered at the earliest stages of visual cortical processing and supports current theories that emphasize the role of abnormalities in perceptual synthesis (eg, false inference) in schizophrenia