Neurons in V2 pool information from V1 neurons coding for more complex features, such illusory contours. This encoding principle proceeds along the visual hierarchy. A hypothetical square neuron is ‘created’ by projections from neurons

coding for its constituting horizontal and vertical lines (Figure 1A). There are three important characteristics. First, processing proceeds from low (lines, edges) to complex (objects, faces) features. As a consequence, if information is lost at the early stages, it is irretrievably lost. In addition, processing at each level is fully determined by processing at the previous level. Second, processing is stereotypical in the sense, that neurons act like filters, which BIBW2992 supplier analyse the visual scene in always the same way, that Sotrastaurin mouse is, independent of the higher level features (Figure 1B). Low determines high level processing and not the other way around. The beauty and main goal of these models is to replace subjective terms, such as grouping and good Gestalt, by a truly mechanistic processing. Third, receptive fields increase along the visual hierarchy because pooling is necessary for object recognition in the

sense that a ‘square neuron’ needs to integrate over larger parts of the visual scene than neurons coding for its constituting lines. For this reason, object recognition becomes difficult when objects are embedded in clutter because object

irrelevant elements Selleckchem MG 132 mingle with relevant ones. This is exactly what crowding is about. You can experience crowding for yourself in Figure 1C. When fixating the central cross, it is easy to recognize the single letter V on the left. However, when the V is flanked by other letters, identification is much more difficult (right). Observers perceive the target letter distorted and jumbled with the flanking letters. For this reason, crowding is often seen as a bottleneck or breakdown of object recognition 2•• and 3. Because crowding is thought to reflect the above characteristics, crowding is a perfect paradigm to study object recognition. For example, flankers always deteriorate performance because pooling more elements leads to an increase in noise. Bouma [4] showed that when a target is presented at eccentricity e, flankers interfere only when presented within a critical window of the size of 0.5 × e (Bouma’s law; Figure 1C). Bouma’s law is explained because pooling, particularly for low level features, occurs only within a restricted region 5 and 6. Current models propose that features are not simply pooled but merged in textural representations by summary statistics 7, 8 and 9•.