Spatial Attention in Early Vision Alternates Direction-of-Figure

Abstract

We propose a computational model consisting of mutually connected V1, V2, and PP modules, to realize the effect of attention to the determination of border-ownership (BO) that tells on which side of a contour owns the border. The V2 module determines BO from surrounding contrast extracted by the V1 module that could be affected by top-down spatial attention from the PP module. The simulation results show that the spatial attention modifies the direction of figure, and that the direction of figure is even flipped in ambiguous figures such as the Rubin’s vase, although the attention is applied only to enhance local contrast in V1. These results show that the activities of BO selective cells in V2 are modified significantly when spatial attention functions in early visual area, V1.