Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

http://www.unicog.org/publications/DehaeneChangeux_ReviewConsciousness_Neuron2011.pdf

Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing

Evidence from functional neuroimaging of the human brain indicates that information about salient properties of an object—such as what it looks like, how it moves, and how it is used—is stored in sensory and motor systems active when that information was acquired. As a result, object concepts belonging to different categories like animals and tools are represented in partially distinct, sensory- and motor property–based neural networks. This suggests that object concepts are not explicitly represented, but rather emerge from weighted activity within property-based brain regions. However, some property-based regions seem to show a categorical organization, thus providing evidence consistent with category-based, domain-specific formulations as well.

/pdf/the-representation-of-object-concepts-in-the-brain-2b5xj3nwz4.pdf

The Representation of Object Concepts in the Brain

https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness08Fall/papers/2006_TiCS_Tsuchiya.pdf

Attention and consciousness : two distinct brain processes

Humans, being highly social creatures, rely heavily on the ability to perceive what others are doing and to infer from gestures and expressions what others may be intending to do. These perceptual skills are easily mastered by most, but not all, people, in large part because human action readily communicates intentions and feelings. In recent years, remarkable advances have been made in our understanding of the visual, motoric, and affective influences on perception of human action, as well as in the elucidation of the neural concomitants of perception of human action. This article reviews those advances and, where possible, draws links among those findings.

/pdf/perception-of-human-motion-2h7r5z9wbq.pdf

Perception of Human Motion

http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/blake/PDFs/KimBlakeTiCS_2005.pdf

Psychophysical magic : rendering the visible 'invisible'

Individuals improve with practice on a variety of perceptual tasks, presumably reflecting plasticity in underlying neural mechanisms. We trained observers to discriminate biological motion from scrambled (nonbiological) motion and examined whether the resulting improvement in perceptual performance was accompanied by changes in activation within the posterior superior temporal sulcus and the fusiform ''face area,'' brain areas involved in perception of biological events. With daily practice, initially naive observers became more proficient at discriminating biological from scrambled animations embedded in an array of dynamic ''noise'' dots, with the extent of improvement varying among observers. Learning generalized to animations never seen before, indicating that observers had not simply memorized specific exemplars. In the same observers, neural activity prior to and following training was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neural activity within the posterior superior temporal sulcus and the fusiform ''face area'' reflected the participants' learning: BOLD signals were significantly larger after training in response both to animations experienced during training and to novel animations. The degree of learning was positively correlated with the amplitude changes in BOLD signals.

Learning to See Biological Motion: Brain Activity Parallels Behavior

Early 20th century artists including Duchamp and Balla tried to portray moving objects on a static canvas by superimposing objects in successive portrayals of an action. We investigated whether implied motion in those paintings is associated with activation of motion-sensitive area MT+. In Experiment 1, we found that observers rated these kinds of paintings higher in portraying motion than they did other abstract paintings in which motion is not intended. We also found that observers who had previously experienced abstract paintings with implied motion tended to give higher motion ratings to that class of paintings. In Experiment 2, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity of observers while viewing abstract paintings receiving the highest and the lowest motion rating scores in Experiment 1. We found MT+, but not primary visual cortex (V1), showed greater BOLD responses to abstract paintings with implied motion than to abstract paintings with little motion impression, but only in observers with prior experience viewing those kinds of paintings. These results imply that the neural machinery ordinarily engaged during perception of real visual motion is activated when people view paintings explicitly designed to convey a sense of visual motion. Experience, however, is necessary to achieve this sense of motion.

Chai-Youn Kim

Papers

Psychophysical magic : rendering the visible 'invisible'

Learning to See Biological Motion: Brain Activity Parallels Behavior

Brain activity accompanying perception of implied motion in abstract paintings.

Binocularity and spatial frequency dependence of calcarine activation in two types of amblyopia

Perceptual Interaction Between Real and Synesthetic Colors