Increasing interhemispheric connectivity between human visual motion areas uncovers asymmetric sensitivity to horizontal motion

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.050
• Publication Date: 2022-08-19T14:37:31Z
• Authors: Emilio Chiappini; Alejandra Sel; Paul B. Hibbard; Alessio Avenanti; Vincenzo Romei
• Keywords: 150; Motion Perception; 610; 501011 Kognitionspsychologie; 501026 Psychology of perception; Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation/methods; Motion; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; transcranial magnetic stimulation; Humans; Hebbian-like plasticity; Hebbian-like plasticity; V5/MT+; bistable motion; ccPAS; cortico-cortical paired associative stimulation; hemispheric specialization; horizontal motion; interhemispheric connectivity; spike-timing-dependent plasticity; transcranial magnetic stimulation; Humans; Motion; Photic Stimulation; Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation; Motion Perception; Visual Cortex; Visual Cortex; horizontal motion; spike-timing-dependent plasticity; V5/MT+; hemispheric specialization; cortico-cortical paired associative stimulation; interhemispheric connectivity; Visual Cortex/physiology; Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation; 501026 Wahrnehmungspsychologie; Motion Perception/physiology; 501011 Cognitive psychology; ccPAS; bistable motion; Photic Stimulation; Photic Stimulation/methods

Our conscious perceptual experience relies on a hierarchical process involving integration of low-level sensory encoding and higher-order sensory selection.1 This hierarchical process may scale at different levels of brain functioning, including integration of information between the hemispheres.2-5 Here, we test this hypothesis for the perception of visual motion stimuli. Across 3 experiments, we manipulated the connectivity between the left and right visual motion complexes (V5/MT+) responsible for horizontal motion perception2,3 by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).4,5 We found that enhancing the strength of connections from the left to the right V5/MT+, by inducing spike-timing-dependent plasticity6 in this pathway, increased sensitivity to horizontal motion. These changes were present immediately and lasted at least 90 min after intervention. Notably, little perceptual changes were observed when strengthening connections from the right to the left V5/MT+. Furthermore, we found that this asymmetric modulation was mirrored by an asymmetric perceptual bias in the direction of the horizontal motion. Overall, observers were biased toward leftward relative to rightward motion direction. Crucially, following the strengthening of the connections from right to left V5/MT+, this bias could be momentarily reversed. These results suggest that the projections connecting left and right V5/MT+ in the human visual cortex are asymmetrical, subtending a hierarchical role of hemispheric specialization7-10 favoring left-to-right hemisphere processing for integrating local sensory input into coherent global motion perception.