Bikalpa Ghimire
Neuroscience Training Program
Department of Neuroscience
Neural mechanisms underlying motion-based segmentation: Insights from visual cortical areas V1 and MT
The visual perception of our natural environment is intricately structured; comprising meaningful objects, surfaces, and the relationships among them. At the early stage of visual processing, the neural representation of the visual world is local. Through processes known as perceptual organization, local elements associated with the same object or surface are integrated, while distinct entities are segregated from each other.
Motion provides an important cue for such grouping and segmentation. One particularly difficult problem in perceptual organization is how spatially overlapping stimuli moving in different directions are segregated to give rise to the perception of overlapping surfaces moving transparently against each other, referred to as motion transparency. In this talk, I will delve into the neural mechanism underlying motion transparency, emphasizing the interplay between two visual cortical areas important for visual motion processing, the primary visual cortex (V1) and the middle-temporal area (MT), which operate at different spatial scales.