SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL COHERENCE IN PERCEPTUAL BINDING

Component visual features of objects are registered by distributed pat terns of activity among neurons comprising multiple pathways and visua l areas, How these distributed patterns of activity give rise to unifi ed representations of objects remains unresolved, although one recent, controversial view posits temporal coherence of neural activity as a binding agent. Motivated by the possible role of temporal coherence In feature binding, we devised a novel psychophysical task that requires the detection of temporal coherence among features comprising complex visual images, Results show that human observers can more easily dete ct synchronized patterns of temporal contrast modulation within hybrid visual Images composed of two components when those components are dr awn from the same original picture. Evidently, time-varying changes wi thin spatially coherent features produce more salient neural signals.