The right visual field advantage and the optimal viewing position effect: On the relation between foveal and parafoveal word recognition

Recent developments on the optimal viewing position (OVP) effect suggest that it may be caused by the same factors that underlie the right visual field advantage in word recognition. This raises the question of the relationship between foveal and parafoveal word recognition. Three experiments are reported in which participants identified tachistoscopically presented words that were presented randomly in foveal and parafoveal vision. The results show that both the OVP effect and the right visual field advantage for word recognition are part of a larger extended OVP curve that has the shape of a Gaussian distribution with the mode shifted to the left of the center of the stimulus word. The shift of the distribution is a function of word length, but not of presentation duration; it is also slightly moderated by the information value of word beginning and word end

Focusing and orienting spatial attention differently modulate crowding in central and peripheral vision

The allocation of attentional resources to a particular location or object in space involves two distinct processes: an orienting process and a focusing process. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that performance of different visual tasks can be improved when a cue, such as a dot, anticipates the position of the target (orienting), or when its dimensions (as in the case of a small square) inform about the size of the attentional window (focusing). Here, we examine the role of these two components of visuo-spatial attention (orienting and focusing) in modulating crowding in peripheral (Experiment 1 and Experiment 3a) and foveal (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3b) vision. The task required to discriminate the orientation of a target letter "T,'' close to acuity threshold, presented with left and right "H'' flankers, as a function of target-flanker distance. Three cue types have been used: a red dot, a small square, and a big square. In peripheral vision (Experiment 1 and Experiment 3a), we found a significant improvement with the red dot and no advantage when a small square was used as a cue. In central vision (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3b), only the small square significantly improved participants' performance, reducing the critical distance needed to recover target identification. Taken together, the results indicate a behavioral dissociation of orienting and focusing attention in their capability of modulating crowding. In particular, we confirmed that orientation of attention can modulate crowding in visual periphery, while we found that focal attention can modulate foveal crowdin

I know you are beautiful even without looking at you: discrimination of facial beauty in peripheral vision

Prior research suggests that facial attractiveness may capture attention at parafovea. However, little is known about how well facial beauty can be detected at parafoveal and peripheral vision. Participants in this study judged relative attractiveness of a face pair presented simultaneously at several eccentricities from the central fixation. The results show that beauty is not only detectable at parafovea but also at periphery. The discrimination performance at parafovea was indistinguishable from the performance around the fovea. Moreover, performance was well above chance even at the periphery. The results show that the visual system is able to use the low spatial frequency information to appraise attractiveness. These findings not only provide an explanation for why a beautiful face could capture attention when central vision is already engaged elsewhere, but also reveal the potential means by which a crowd of faces is quickly scanned for attractiveness

Dissociation of sensitivity to spatial frequency in word and face preferential areas of the fusiform gyrus

Different cortical regions within the ventral occipitotemporal junction have been reported to show preferential responses to particular objects. Thus, it is argued that there is evidence for a left-lateralized visual word form area and a right-lateralized fusiform face area, but the unique specialization of these areas remains controversial. Words are characterized by greater power in the high spatial frequency (SF) range, whereas faces comprise a broader range of high and low frequencies. We investigated how these high-order visual association areas respond to simple sine-wave gratings that varied in SF. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrated lateralization of activity that was concordant with the low-level visual property of words and faces; left occipitotemporal cortex is more strongly activated by high than by low SF gratings, whereas the right occipitotemporal cortex responded more to low than high spatial frequencies. Therefore, the SF of a visual stimulus may bias the lateralization of processing irrespective of its higher order properties

Object Detection Through Exploration With A Foveated Visual Field

We present a foveated object detector (FOD) as a biologically-inspired alternative to the sliding window (SW) approach which is the dominant method of search in computer vision object detection. Similar to the human visual system, the FOD has higher resolution at the fovea and lower resolution at the visual periphery. Consequently, more computational resources are allocated at the fovea and relatively fewer at the periphery. The FOD processes the entire scene, uses retino-specific object detection classifiers to guide eye movements, aligns its fovea with regions of interest in the input image and integrates observations across multiple fixations. Our approach combines modern object detectors from computer vision with a recent model of peripheral pooling regions found at the V1 layer of the human visual system. We assessed various eye movement strategies on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset and show that the FOD performs on par with the SW detector while bringing significant computational cost savings.Comment: An extended version of this manuscript was published in PLOS Computational Biology (October 2017) at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.100574

Interhemispheric transfer and the processing of foveally presented stimuli

A review of the literature shows that the LVF and the RVF do not overlap. This means that foveal representations of words are effectively split and that interhemispheric communication is needed to recognise centrally presented words

Real-Time Anisotropic Diffusion using Space-Variant Vision

Many computer and robot vision applications require multi-scale image analysis. Classically, this has been accomplished through the use of a linear scale-space, which is constructed by convolution of visual input with Gaussian kernels of varying size (scale). This has been shown to be equivalent to the solution of a linear diffusion equation on an infinite domain, as the Gaussian is the Green's function of such a system (Koenderink, 1984). Recently, much work has been focused on the use of a variable conductance function resulting in anisotropic diffusion described by a nonlinear partial differential equation (PDF). The use of anisotropic diffusion with a conductance coefficient which is a decreasing function of the gradient magnitude has been shown to enhance edges, while decreasing some types of noise (Perona and Malik, 1987). Unfortunately, the solution of the anisotropic diffusion equation requires the numerical integration of a nonlinear PDF which is a costly process when carried out on a fixed mesh such as a typical image. In this paper we show that the complex log transformation, variants of which are universally used in mammalian retino-cortical systems, allows the nonlinear diffusion equation to be integrated at exponentially enhanced rates due to the non-uniform mesh spacing inherent in the log domain. The enhanced integration rates, coupled with the intrinsic compression of the complex log transformation, yields a seed increase of between two and three orders of magnitude, providing a means of performing real-time image enhancement using anisotropic diffusion.Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-I-0409

Longer fixation duration while viewing face images

The spatio-temporal properties of saccadic eye movements can be influenced by the cognitive demand and the characteristics of the observed scene. Probably due to its crucial role in social communication, it is argued that face perception may involve different cognitive processes compared with non-face object or scene perception. In this study, we investigated whether and how face and natural scene images can influence the patterns of visuomotor activity. We recorded monkeys’ saccadic eye movements as they freely viewed monkey face and natural scene images. The face and natural scene images attracted similar number of fixations, but viewing of faces was accompanied by longer fixations compared with natural scenes. These longer fixations were dependent on the context of facial features. The duration of fixations directed at facial contours decreased when the face images were scrambled, and increased at the later stage of normal face viewing. The results suggest that face and natural scene images can generate different patterns of visuomotor activity. The extra fixation duration on faces may be correlated with the detailed analysis of facial features