ABSTRACT
Theprimate visual systemhas been studied byneurobiologists for nearly 4 decades. As a result, we know a great deal about how neurons at early levels of visual processing represent basic features of the retinal image, such as the orientation of a contour or the color of a patch of light. Nevertheless, we know very little about how such cells give rise to our perceptual experience of the world. One reason for this limited knowledge is that perception is context dependent. Just as the meaning of a word depends on the sentence in which the word is embedded, the perceptual interpretation of a retinal image feature depends on the spatial and temporal context in which the feature appears. Until recently, contextual manipulations have been largely excluded from studies of the response properties of visual neurons, primarily as a matter of investigative convenience.
