Abstract
Ponzo illusion is a well-known perceptual phenomenon in which the perceived sizes of visual objects are altered by visual depth cues created by converging lines at the horizon. One possible neural mechanism of the Ponzo illusion is the receptive field position shifts of V1 neurons, as supported by a recent monkey electrophysiological study (Ni et al. in Curr Biol 24(14):1653–1658, 2014). Here, we used fMRI-based population receptive field (pRF) mapping technique in combination of psychophysics to investigate this idea. We found that, relative to the close apparent depth in a 3D scene, the far apparent depth in the scene caused the pRF positions of voxels in V1–V3 to shift toward the fovea, in line with subjects’ percept of the Ponzo illusion. Moreover, the pRF position shift in V1 significantly correlated with the magnitude of the Ponzo illusion across individual subjects. Our findings thus provide evidence for the close association between the perceived object size and the pRF position shift in human visual areas, especially in V1, lending further support for the receptive field position shift explanation for the Ponzo illusion.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alonso JM, Usrey WM, Reid RC (2001) Rules of connectivity between geniculate cells and simple cells in cat primary visual cortex. J Neurosci 21(11):4002–4015
Boyaci H, Fang F, Murray SO, Kersten D (2007) Responses to lightness variations in early human visual cortex. Curr Biol 17(11):989–993
Dumoulin SO, Wandell BA (2008) Population receptive field estimates in human visual cortex. Neuroimage 39(2):647–660
Engel SA, Glover GH, Wandell BA (1997) Retinotopic organization in human visual cortex and the spatial precision of functional MRI. Cereb Cortex 7(2):181–192
Fang F, Boyaci H, Kersten D, Murray SO (2008) Attention-dependent representation of a size illusion in human V1. Curr Biol 18(21):1707–1712
Gilbert CD, Wiesel TN (1989) Columnar specificity of intrinsic horizontal and corticocortical connections in cat visual cortex. J Neurosci 9(7):2432–2442
Kok P, de Lange FP (2014) Shape perception simultaneously up-and downregulates neural activity in the primary visual cortex. Curr Biol 24(13):1531–1535
Leibowitz H, Brislin R, Perlmutrer L, Hennessy R (1969) Ponzo perspective illusion as a manifestation of space perception. Science 166(3909):1174–1176
Lund JS, Angelucci A, Bressloff PC (2003) Anatomical substrates for functional columns in macaque monkey primary visual cortex. Cereb Cortex 13(1):15–24
Marg E, Adams JE (1970) Evidence for a neurological zoom system in vision from angular changes in some receptive fields of single neurons with changes in fixation distance in the human visual cortex. Experientia 26(3):270–271
Michel MM, Chen Y, Geisler WS, Seidemann E (2013) An illusion predicted by V1 population activity implicates cortical topography in shape perception. Nat Neurosci 16(10):1477–1483
Mukamel R, Fried I (2012) Human intracranial recordings and cognitive neuroscience. Ann Rev Psychol 63:511–537
Murray SO, Boyaci H, Kersten D (2006) The representation of perceived angular size in human primary visual cortex. Nat Neurosci 9(3):429–434
Ni AM, Murray SO, Horwitz GD (2014) Object-centered shifts of receptive field positions in monkey primary visual cortex. Curr Biol 24(14):1653–1658
Pooresmaeili A, Arrighi R, Biagi L, Morrone MC (2013) Blood oxygen level-dependent activation of the primary visual cortex predicts size adaptation illusion. J Neurosci 33(40):15999–16008
Reid RC, Alonso JM (1995) Specificity of monosynaptic connections from thalamus to visual cortex. Nature 378(6554):281–283
Schwarzkopf DS, Song C, Rees G (2011) The surface area of human V1 predicts the subjective experience of object size. Nat Neurosci 14(1):28–30
Sereno MI, Dale AM, Reppas JB, Kwong KK, Belliveau JW, Brady TJ et al (1995) Borders of multiple visual areas in humans revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Science 268(5212):889–893
Sperandio I, Chouinard PA (2015) The mechanisms of size constancy. Multisens Res 28(3–4):253–283
Sperandio I, Chouinard PA, Goodale MA (2012) Retinotopic activity in V1 reflects the perceived and not the retinal size of an afterimage. Nat Neurosci 15(4):540–542
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2015CB351800) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31230029 and 31421003). We thank the staff at the Center for MRI Research at Peking University for technical support.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
He, D., Mo, C., Wang, Y. et al. Position shifts of fMRI-based population receptive fields in human visual cortex induced by Ponzo illusion. Exp Brain Res 233, 3535–3541 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4425-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4425-3