paper on binding and synchrony

[M.Usher@ukc.ac.uk]

Researchers who are interested on the issue of neural synchrony
as a mechanism for binding of visual information, might enjoy
to read the following article that has just appeared last week in
Nature (9 July, 1998, pp, 179-182). In this article we report results
of psychophysical experiments that support a causal relation between
synchrony and processes of visual grouping and segmentation.
 
The article can be also accessed on our web-site: 
http://www.ukc.ac.uk/psychology/people/usherm/
 
 
Marius Usher
 
Lecturer in Psychology
University of Kent,
Canterbury, UK
 
 
    Visual synchrony affects binding and segmentation in perception 
 
                 Marius Usher and Nick Donnelly 
 
                           ABSTRACT 
 
The visual system analyses information by decomposing complex objects into 
simple components (visual features) widely distributed across the cortex.
When several objects are simultaneously present in the visual field, 
a mechanism is required to group (bind) together visual features belonging to 
each object and to separate (segment) them from features of other objects. 
An attractive scheme for binding visual features into a coherent percept 
If synchrony plays a major role in binding, one should expect that grouping 
and segmentation are facilitated in visual displays that induce stimulus
dependent synchrony by temporal manipulations. We report data demonstrating 
that visual grouping is indeed facilitated when elements of one percept 
are presented simultaneously and are temporally separated (on a scale below 
the integration time of the visual system from elements of another percept 
is due to a global mechanism of grouping caused by synchronous neural
activation and not to a local mechanism of motion computation.