Event:

The brain has to create a coherent visual percept from a multitude of constantly changing sensory information. My talk focuses on early visual cortex and how it is influenced by audition, emotion and visual context via top-down feedback from other brain areas. I will present evidence from human fMRI studies that categorical information from sounds and imagery can be decoded from neural activity patterns in early visual cortex in the absence of visual stimulation. Furthermore, emotional valence from sounds can be decoded in early visual cortex during visual stimulation to help solve ambiguities, thus potentially serving a function in visual perception. Evidence from psychophysical and TMS studies shows how contextual information from the visual surround is integrated in V1 and identifies the brain circuits involved in this integration. The results are consistent with theories of predictive coding and demonstrate that top-down feedback to early visual cortex plays a functional role in integrating contextual and predictive information already on the earliest cortical processing level.