Scottish Vision Group Dundarach Hotel

Sensory experience allows anticipation, yet one sensory stimulus also ‘masks’ perception and neural processing of subsequent stimuli. To understand this paradox we compared cell responses in monkey temporal cortex to body images presented individually, in pairs and in action sequences. Responses to one image suppressed responses to similar images for ~500ms. This suppression led to responses peaking 100ms earlier to image sequences than to isolated images (e.g., during head rotation, face-selective activity peaks before the face confronts the observer). Thus masking has unrecognized benefits for perception because it can transform neuronal activity to make it predictive during natural change.