The effect of image scrambling on visual cortical BOLD activity in the anesthetized monkey.

We have investigated BOLD signal changes associated with scrambling natural images into different numbers of segments in visually modulated regions of the macaque monkey (macacca mulatta) brain. For 10 degrees x 10 degrees images, we observed that BOLD activity in primary visual cortex (V1) increased with scrambling, and then dramatically dropped for very highly scrambled images (128 x 128 segments). In extrastriate visual areas, BOLD signal levels did not distinguish between natural images and scrambled images, except that as in V1 very highly scrambled images led to a drop in BOLD activity. Finally in the superior temporal sulcus region and inferior temporal cortex, BOLD activity decreased systematically with scrambling. Our results are consistent with the view that the BOLD signal might reflect average activation of local orienation detectors in V1, and sensitivity to more global object representations in higher visual areas. In addition, we quantify the effects of scrambling on the Fourier amplitude spectrum of the images. This analysis shows that scrambling causes substantial changes to the spatial frequency content of images. This suggests that low-level accounts for reduced BOLD activation in higher visual areas cannot be completely ruled out based on scrambling data.