Cognitive mechanisms of transitive inference

Objects in natural scenes are rarely seen in isolation, but are usually overlapping or partially occluding other objects. To recognize individual objects, the visual system must be able to segregate overlapping objects from one another. Evidence from lesions in humans and monkeys suggest that perceptual segregation of occluded or overlapping objects involves extrastriate visual cortex. In monkeys, area V4 has been shown to play an important role in recognizing occluded or poorly salient shapes. In humans, a retinotopic homologue of ventral V4 (V4v) has been described, but it is not known whether this area is also functionally homologous to area V4 in monkeys. In this study, we tried to localize the visual cortical regions involved in perceptual segregation of overlapping shapes using positron emission tomography (PET). Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was measured in seven subjects while they discriminated the relative areas of simultaneously presented rectangular shapes. In the control condition, the shapes were displayed without overlaps; in a second condition, the shapes overlapped each other partially. In a third condition, the shapes did not overlap but had been reduced in salience by adding random noise to the stimuli. Contrasting the overlapping shape condition with the control condition identified a single region in the left posterior lateral occipital cortex. The rCBF in this region also increased, though more weakly, during discrimination of shapes embedded in noise, relative to the control condition. The region activated by segregation of overlapping shapes was located in the posterior occipital cortex close to the anterior border of area V2, near the average location of human V4v as determined by retinotopic mapping studies. The activation of this region of extrastriate visual cortex by a task that involved segregation of overlapping shapes is consistent with monkey V4 and human V4v being functionally homologous. We conclude that discrimination of overlapping shapes involves in particular a region of extrastriate visual cortex located in the left lateral occipital cortex and that this region may correspond to human V4v.