| Our visual system can extract information we need from the external environmentbased on object recognition,contour integration is an important intermediate step inobject recognition.The intrinsic mechanism of the contour integration has been a hottopic in vision research.A large number of physiological experiments andpsychophysical experiments show that we can integrating contours based on the basicgestalt perceptual grouping rules.This is a complex process may be based oncontextual interactions involved in the feedback from the primary visual pathway andtop–down inputs from higher cortical. This process is also influenced by contour of thebackground.Whether contour integration process must be completed in the case ofconscious participation and which site this process occurs in the visual pathway,there is no conclusion now.A psychophysical method was used in this study, using binocular rivalry flashsuppression paradigm, masking the other side of the eye with the side of the eye of theperipheral dynamic mosaic, so that the outer peripheral clues contour stimuli in a state ofunconsciousness,to research peripheral clues contour influence center contour integrationunder the state of unconsciousness.Through the analysis of binocular rivalry toinvestigate the location of the contour integrated in the visual pathway. The study wasdesigned four experiments, to study the relationship between contour integration andawareness under the conditions of binocular rivalry.Experiment1, use the staircase method measured each collinear contour contrastthreshold, as the next experiment stimulus contrast.Experiment2, the central target stimulus contour recognition accuracy wasmeasured without any stimulation of peripheral contour,as a baseline.Experiment3,design a visible peripheral contour to study the conscious peripheralcontour cues influence center contour integration.Experiment4,design a invisible peripheral contour to study the unconsciousperipheral contour cues influence center contour integration. The results showed that conscious peripheral contour cues could improve theperform of center contour integration and unconscious peripheral contour cues couldimprove the perform of center contour integration,too.There isn’t a significant differenceof center contour integration accuracy between conscious peripheral contour cues andunconscious peripheral contour cues,but conscious homogeneous peripheral contourcould interference central contour recognition result a decrease on accuracy.Thus inferthat the invisible peripheral gabor grating is processing into unconscious peripheralcontour cues and improve the perform of center contour integration even subject couldnot see the peripheral gabor grating,so the process of contour integration may occurbefore high visual process involve consciousness.In the process of binocularrivalry,the suppressed peripheral contour cues could improve the perform of centercontour integration in the other eye,suggest that the suppressed information could beintegrated,visual information integrating between binocular then improve contourintegration.The process of contour integration may hardly influence by binocularrivalry.homogeneous visual information may suppress each other in the process ofcontour integration result in a contour recognition difficulties. |
