fMRI studies of visual cortical activity during noise stimulation

Abstract Psychophysics experiments on the human visual system have established that the sensitivity for the detection of fine detail in noise contaminated images can be quantitatively and repeatably measured using stochastic resonance as a tool. Optimal noise results in maximal sensitivity. Does this mean simply that the retina is averaging out the noise, or instead is the visual cortex involved in some level of computation? We report results of functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments which indicate the latter.

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