Cortical interactions in vision and awareness: Hierarchies in reverse

The anatomical connections between visual areas can be organized in 'feedforward', 'feedback' or 'horizontal' laminar patterns. We report here four experiments that test the function of some of the feedback projections in visual cortex. Projections from V5 to V1 have been suggested to be important in visual awareness, and in the first experiment we show this to be the case in the blindsight patient GY. This demonstration is replicated, in principle, in the second experiment and we also show the timing of the V5-V1 interaction to correspond to findings from single unit physiology. In the third experiment we show that V1 is important for stimulus detection in visual search arrays and that the timing of V1 interference with TMS is late (up to 240 ms after the onset of the visual array). Finally we report an experiment showing that the parietal cortex is not involved in visual motion priming, whereas V5 is, suggesting that the parietal cortex does not modulate V5 in this task. We interpret the data in terms of Bullier's recent physiological recordings and Ahissar and Hochstein's reverse hierarchy theory of vision.