Spinoza researchers help uncover how we distinguish objects from their background
23 June 2025How do we visually segregate objects from other objects and the background?
Humans readily see the boundaries that demarcate objects, but it is not well understood how boundaries are represented in the visual cortex. A team of researchers of the Spinoza Centre, NIN, and Amsterdam UMC used primate electrophysiology, human neuroimaging, and computational modeling to investigate how neurons in the visual brain detect and represent object boundaries and how they distinguish them from other image regions with a similar level of contrast or orientation energy. They report that the representation of object borders is enhanced in the early visual cortex. Enhanced activity during the start of neuronal responses reflects the tuning to features in the receptive field. A later response enhancement also reflects contextual influences, mediated by lateral and feedback connections.
This work, co-authored by Wietske Zuiderbaan and Serge Dumoulin, has now been published in PNAS. You can read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2221623121