‘Visual clutter’ alters information flow in the brain

Whether we're staring at our phones, the page of a book, or the person across the table, the objects of our focus never stand in isolation; there are always other objects or people in our field of vision. How that visual "clutter" affects visual processing in the brain, however, is not well understood.

In a new study, Yale researchers show that this clutter alters how information flows in the brain, as does the precise location of that clutter within the wider field of vision. The findings help clarify the neural basis of perception and offer a deeper understanding of the visual cortex in the brain.

The researchers trained macaque monkeys - a species whose visual systems and abilities are most similar to humans - to fixate on the center of a screen while visual stimuli were presented in and outside of their receptive fields. During this task, researchers recorded neural activity in the monkey's primary visual cortex, the brain's main gateway for visual information processing.

They found that the specific location of clutter within the monkey's visual field didn't have much of an effect on how information was passed between neurons in the primary visual cortex. It did, however, affect how efficiently that information flowed.