Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision

Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision

Several types of suppression phenomena have been observed in the visual system. For example, the ability to detect a target stimulus is often impaired when the target is embedded in a high-contrast surround. This contextual modulation, known as surround suppression, was formerly thought to occur only in the periphery. Another type of suppression phenomena is interocular suppression, in which th...

Interocular Suppression and Contrast Gain Control in Human Vision

Texture-surround suppression of contour-shape coding in human vision.

Contextual influences on neurons in the primary visual cortex have largely been studied using simple visual stimuli and their functional role is still poorly understood. Using a novel visual after-effect of perceived shape we show psychophysically that the coding of a contour's shape is inhibited by nearby parallel, but not orthogonal texture orientations. This suggests that neurons in the visu...

Stimulus Fractionation by Interocular Suppression

Can human observers distinguish physical removal of a visible stimulus from phenomenal suppression of that stimulus during binocular rivalry? As so often happens, simple questions produce complex answers, and that is the case in the study reported here. Using continuous flash suppression to produce binocular rivalry, we were able to identify stimulus conditions where most - but not all - people...

Visual Surround Suppression in Schizophrenia

Compared to unaffected observers patients with schizophrenia (SZ) show characteristic differences in visual perception, including a reduced susceptibility to the influence of context on judgments of contrast - a manifestation of weaker surround suppression (SS). To examine the generality of this phenomenon we measured the ability of 24 individuals with SZ to judge the luminance, contrast, orien...