A central characteristic of brain function is the ability to merge sensory input with internal representations of the world, but relatively little is known about cortical feedback channels that facilitate internal representations. We blocked feedforward input to subsections of human primary visual cortex by occluding one quarter of the visual field while participants viewed 384 real-world scenes. Using high-resolution 7T fMRI, we show that superficial layers of V1 exhibit predictive response properties unique from those associated with V1 feedforward processing. Our findings suggest that feedback to superficial layers of V1 provides neurons with contextual information not available via feedforward input.
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