Romo says the findings indicate that touch perception arises not in S1 but higher level areas such as MPC, where sensory signals merge with signals related to memory, expectation, and attention.
At this stage, visual areas decompose the visual input into separate feature maps (colour, orientation, motion).. Secondly, all of these signals converge towards higher level areas (e.g. FEF, PEF, PPC).
Oculomotor extrapolations were included to distinguish between potentially distinct extrapolation processes for perception and action, which may involve different higher level areas of the ventral and dorsal streams [22], [47] [49].
David et al. [62] proposed that increases in duration of activation may depend on the increased contribution of top down connections, reflecting re-entry of neural signals to lower-level processing areas, as EPs were found to be more enduring and dispersed in higher level areas [62].
Both kinds of information are integrated in higher level areas such as STS and fusiform areas, resulting in different responses depending on the order of the presented images.
Thus, motion aftereffects likely originate not from adaptation in one area or circuit but from many stages of processing both in early sensory areas and in higher level areas.
This is consistent with a role of top-down signals disambiguating activity in lower areas and enabling a more efficient processing of low-level visual attributes that conform to the processing established by higher level areas.
This is similar to the proposals by Feldman and Friston (2010) and in this article, where higher precision at lower levels induces more rapid changes in the activity of higher level areas.
Both these processes take place before visual information reaches the higher level areas of the ventral stream in the inferior temporal (IT) lobe where semantic value is added to visual information.
