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Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences logoLink to Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
. 2000 May 7;267(1446):845–850. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2000.1080

How does the brain sustain a visual percept?

C M Portas 1, B A Strange 1, K J Friston 1, R J Dolan 1, C D Frith 1
PMCID: PMC1690623  PMID: 10853725

Abstract

Perception involves the processing of sensory stimuli and their translation into conscious experience. A novel percept can, once synthesized, be maintained or discarded from awareness. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to separate the neural responses associated with the maintenance of a percept, produced by single-image, random-dot stereograms, from the response evoked at the onset of the percept. The latter was associated with distributed bilateral activation in the posterior thalamus and regions in the occipito-temporal, parietal and frontal cortices. In contrast, sustained perception was associated with activation of the pre-frontal cortex and hippocampus. This observation suggests that sustaining a visual percept involves neuroanatomical systems which are implicated in memory function and which are distinct from those engaged during perceptual synthesis.

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