Sparsely distributed contours dominate extra-striate responses to complex scenes

The human visual system exploits redundancy in natural scenes to derive useful information. Such redundancy is frequently associated with either contours or textures within images. In this study we use fMRI to evaluate how the total amount of contrast-energy contained in contours and textures within natural images affect responses in visual cortex. We used both the entire natural image and parts of it containing predominantly contour or texture information. We modified these natural images in order to match other image properties that are known to affect cortical responses as closely as possible. These modified natural images, i.e. pseudo-natural images, remain highly recognizable. We also used synthetic images without recognizable content but with closely matched image properties. We report that most of the primary visual cortex (V1) signal variations are explained by the total amount of contrast-energy in the images. Extra-striate visual cortex, on the other hand, is driven strongest by images containing sparsely distributed contours; independent of contrast-energy amount or recognizable image content. These results provide evidence for an initial representation of natural images in V1 based on local oriented filters. Later visual cortex (and to a modest degree V1) incorporates a facilitation of contour-based structure and suppressive interactions that effectively amplify sparse-contour information within natural images.