Collinear Suppression in Texture Segmentation for Temporally Modulated Stimuli

Collinear stimuli facilitate the neural signal in the case of Gabor's stimuli when a low-contrast stimulus inside the receptive field is flanked by higher contrast collinear elements located in surrounding regions of the visual space. Our previous studies pointed to the contextual modulation in the case of the textured stimuli. Collinear suppression was observed in 63% of the responses. In the current research we used Gabor's primitives for building the circular texture objects of vertical and diagonal orientation to be recognized on the horizontally-oriented background in the presence of collinear and orthogonal peripheral stimuli. The two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) psychophysical method with constant stimuli was used to gather the responses of the subjects which choose between left or right position of diagonally-oriented stimuli. The experimental stimuli consisted of two circularly shaped objects presented in visual angle of 2.76 degrees. The expositions of the stimuli varied from 13.3 to 93.3 ms arbitrarily. Visual stimuli were presented with a CRS Visage stimulus generator and shown on a CRT monitor of 75 Hz refresh rate. Our new findings support the concept of suppressing the target stimuli of the same orientation in the presence of a peripheral collinear stimulation.