TY - JOUR
T1 - Coding of low-level position and orientation information in human naturalistic vision
AU - Christensen, Jeppe H.
AU - Bex, Peter J.
AU - Fiser, József
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Christensen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2019/2
Y1 - 2019/2
N2 - Orientation and position of small image segments are considered to be two fundamental low-level attributes in early visual processing, yet their encoding in complex natural stimuli is underexplored. By measuring the just-noticeable differences in noise perturbation, we investigated how orientation and position information of a large number of local elements (Gabors) were encoded separately or jointly. Importantly, the Gabors composed various classes of naturalistic stimuli that were equated by all low-level attributes and differed only in their higher-order configural complexity and familiarity. Although unable to consciously tell apart the type of perturbation, observers detected orientation and position noise significantly differently. Furthermore, when the Gabors were perturbed by both types of noise simultaneously, performance adhered to a reliability-based optimal probabilistic combination of individual attribute noises. Our results suggest that orientation and position are independently coded and probabilistically combined for naturalistic stimuli at the earliest stage of visual processing.
AB - Orientation and position of small image segments are considered to be two fundamental low-level attributes in early visual processing, yet their encoding in complex natural stimuli is underexplored. By measuring the just-noticeable differences in noise perturbation, we investigated how orientation and position information of a large number of local elements (Gabors) were encoded separately or jointly. Importantly, the Gabors composed various classes of naturalistic stimuli that were equated by all low-level attributes and differed only in their higher-order configural complexity and familiarity. Although unable to consciously tell apart the type of perturbation, observers detected orientation and position noise significantly differently. Furthermore, when the Gabors were perturbed by both types of noise simultaneously, performance adhered to a reliability-based optimal probabilistic combination of individual attribute noises. Our results suggest that orientation and position are independently coded and probabilistically combined for naturalistic stimuli at the earliest stage of visual processing.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85061348107&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0212141
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0212141
M3 - Article
C2 - 30742680
AN - SCOPUS:85061348107
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 14
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 2
M1 - e0212141
ER -