F. Wilkinson et al., An fMRI study of the selective activation of human extrastriate form vision areas by radial and concentric gratings, CURR BIOL, 10(22), 2000, pp. 1455-1458
The ventral form vision pathway of the primate brain comprises a sequence o
f areas that include V1, V2, V4 and the inferior temporal cortex (IT) [1].
Although contour extraction in the VI area and responses to complex images,
such as faces, in the IT have been studied extensively, much less is known
about shape extraction at intermediate cortical levels such as V4. Here, w
e used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to demonstrate that the
human V4 is more strongly activated by concentric and radial patterns than
by conventional sinusoidal gratings. This is consistent with global poolin
g of local Vl orientations to extract concentric and radial shape informati
on in V4. Furthermore, concentric patterns were found to be effective in ac
tivating the fusiform face area. These findings support recent psychophysic
al [2,3] and physiological [4,5] data indicating that analysis of concentri
c and radial structure represents an important aspect of processing at inte
rmediate levels of form vision.