Bistability of prefrontal states gates access to consciousness.

Access of sensory information to consciousness has been linked to the ignition of content-specific representations in association cortices. How does ignition interact with intrinsic cortical state fluctuations to give rise to conscious perception? We addressed this question in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) by combining multi-electrode recordings with a binocular rivalry (BR) paradigm inducing spontaneously driven changes in the content of consciousness, inferred from the reflexive optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) pattern. We find that fluctuations between low-frequency (LF, 1-9 Hz) and beta (∼20-40 Hz) local field potentials (LFPs) reflect competition between spontaneous updates and stability of conscious contents, respectively. Both LF and beta events were locally modulated. The phase of the former locked differentially to the competing populations just before a spontaneous transition while the latter synchronized the neuronal ensemble coding the consciously perceived content. These results suggest that prefrontal state fluctuations gate conscious perception by mediating internal states that facilitate perceptual update and stability.

Adaptation aftereffects reveal representations for encoding of contingent social actions.

A hallmark of human social behavior is the effortless ability to relate one's own actions to that of the interaction partner, e.g., when stretching out one's arms to catch a tripping child. What are the behavioral properties of the neural substrates that support this indispensable human skill? Here we examined the processes underlying the ability to relate actions to each other, namely the recognition of spatiotemporal contingencies between actions (e.g., a "giving" that is followed by a "taking"). We used a behavioral adaptation paradigm to examine the response properties of perceptual mechanisms at a behavioral level. In contrast to the common view that action-sensitive units are primarily selective for one action (i.e., primary action, e.g., 'throwing"), we demonstrate that these processes also exhibit sensitivity to a matching contingent action (e.g., "catching"). Control experiments demonstrate that the sensitivity of action recognition processes to contingent actions cannot be explained by lower-level visual features or amodal semantic adaptation. Moreover, we show that action recognition processes are sensitive only to contingent actions, but not to noncontingent actions, demonstrating their selective sensitivity to contingent actions. Our findings show the selective coding mechanism for action contingencies by action-sensitive processes and demonstrate how the representations of individual actions in social interactions can be linked in a unified representation.

Lighting-from-above prior in biological motion perception.

The visual system is able to recognize body motion from impoverished stimuli. This requires combining stimulus information with visual priors. We present a new visual illusion showing that one of these priors is the assumption that bodies are typically illuminated from above. A change of illumination direction from above to below flips the perceived locomotion direction of a biological motion stimulus. Control experiments show that the underlying mechanism is different from shape-from-shading and directly combines information about body motion with a lighting-from-above prior. We further show that the illusion is critically dependent on the intrinsic luminance gradients of the most mobile parts of the moving body. We present a neural model with physiologically plausible mechanisms that accounts for the illusion and shows how the illumination prior might be encoded within the visual pathway. Our experiments demonstrate, for the first time, a direct influence of illumination priors in high-level motion vision.