Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive Visual Cortex Allows Prediction of Perceptual States during Ambiguous Structure-From-Motion

We investigated the role of retinotopic visual cortex and motion-sensitive areas in representing the content of visual awareness during ambiguous structure-from-motion (SFM), using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and multivariate statistics (support vector machines). Our results indicate that prediction of perceptual states can be very accurate for data taken from dorsal visual areas V3A,V4D,V7, andMTand forparietal areas responsive toSFM,but to a lesser extent for other visual areas.Generalizationofprediction was possible, because prediction accuracy was significantly better than chance for both an unambiguous stimulus and a different experimental design.Detailed analysis of eyemovements revealed that strategic and even encouragedbeneficial eyemovementswere not the cause of the prediction accuracy based on cortical activation. We conclude that during perceptual rivalry, neural correlates of visual awareness can be found in retinotopic visual cortex, MT, and parietal cortex. We argue that the organization of specific motion-sensitiveneurons creates detectable biases in thepreferreddirection selectivity of voxels, allowingpredictionof perceptual states.During perceptual rivalry, retinotopic visual cortex, in particular higher-tier dorsal areas like V3A and V7, actively represents the content the visual awareness. Key words: perceptual bistability; structure-from-motion; fMRI; visual cortex; ambiguously rotating spheres; multivariate classificatio