Large crowding zones in peripheral vision for briefly presented stimuli

YesWhen a target is flanked by distractors, it becomes more difficult to identify. In the periphery, this crowding effect extends over a wide range of target-flanker separations, called the spatial extent of interaction (EoI). A recent study showed that the EoI dramatically increases in size for short presentation durations (Chung & Mansfield, 2009). Here we investigate this duration-EoI relation in greater detail and show that (a) it holds even when visibility of the unflanked target is equated for different durations, (b) the function saturates for durations shorter than 30 to 80 ms, and (c) the largest EoIs represent a critical spacing greater than 50% of eccentricity. We also investigated the effect of same or different polarity for targets and flankers across different presentation durations. We found that EoIs for target and flankers having opposite polarity (one white, the other black) show the same temporal pattern as for same polarity stimuli, but are smaller at all durations by 29% to 44%. The observed saturation of the EoI for shortduration stimuli suggests that crowding follows the locus of temporal integration. Overall, the results constrain theories that map crowding zones to fixed spatial extents or to lateral connections of fixed length in the cortex.This study was supported by the ERC POSITION 324070 (PC) and a visiting professorship to Anglia Ruskin University from the Leverhulme Trust (HEB)

Stream specificity and asymmetries in feature binding and content-addressable access in visual encoding and memory

YesHuman memory is content addressable—i.e., contents of the memory can be accessed using partial information about the bound features of a stored item. In this study, we used a cross-feature cuing technique to examine how the human visual system encodes, binds, and retains information about multiple stimulus features within a set of moving objects. We sought to characterize the roles of three different features (position, color, and direction of motion, the latter two of which are processed preferentially within the ventral and dorsal visual streams, respectively) in the construction and maintenance of object representations. We investigated the extent to which these features are bound together across the following processing stages: during stimulus encoding, sensory (iconic) memory, and visual shortterm memory. Whereas all features examined here can serve as cues for addressing content, their effectiveness shows asymmetries and varies according to cue–report pairings and the stage of information processing and storage. Position-based indexing theories predict that position should be more effective as a cue compared to other features. While we found a privileged role for position as a cue at the stimulus-encoding stage, position was not the privileged cue at the sensory and visual short-term memory stages. Instead, the pattern that emerged from our findings is one that mirrors the parallel processing streams in the visual system. This stream-specific binding and cuing effectiveness manifests itself in all three stages of information processing examined here. Finally, we find that the Leaky Flask model proposed in our previous study is applicable to all three features

Misperceptions in the Trajectories of Objects undergoing Curvilinear Motion

Trajectory perception is crucial in scene understanding and action. A variety of trajectory misperceptions have been reported in the literature. In this study, we quantify earlier observations that reported distortions in the perceived shape of bilinear trajectories and in the perceived positions of their deviation. Our results show that bilinear trajectories with deviation angles smaller than 90 deg are perceived smoothed while those with deviation angles larger than 90 degrees are perceived sharpened. The sharpening effect is weaker in magnitude than the smoothing effect. We also found a correlation between the distortion of perceived trajectories and the perceived shift of their deviation point. Finally, using a dual-task paradigm, we found that reducing attentional resources allocated to the moving target causes an increase in the perceived shift of the deviation point of the trajectory. We interpret these results in the context of interactions between motion and position systems

The reference frame for encoding and retention of motion depends on stimulus set size

YesThe goal of this study was to investigate the reference frames used in perceptual encoding and storage of visual motion information. In our experiments, observers viewed multiple moving objects and reported the direction of motion of a randomly selected item. Using a vector-decomposition technique, we computed performance during smooth pursuit with respect to a spatiotopic (nonretinotopic) and to a retinotopic component and compared them with performance during fixation, which served as the baseline. For the stimulus encoding stage, which precedes memory, we found that the reference frame depends on the stimulus set size. For a single moving target, the spatiotopic reference frame had the most significant contribution with some additional contribution from the retinotopic reference frame. When the number of items increased (Set Sizes 3 to 7), the spatiotopic reference frame was able to account for the performance. Finally, when the number of items became larger than 7, the distinction between reference frames vanished. We interpret this finding as a switch to a more abstract nonmetric encoding of motion direction. We found that the retinotopic reference frame was not used in memory. Taken together with other studies, our results suggest that, whereas a retinotopic reference frame may be employed for controlling eye movements, perception and memory use primarily nonretinotopic reference frames. Furthermore, the use of nonretinotopic reference frames appears to be capacity limited. In the case of complex stimuli, the visual system may use perceptual grouping in order to simplify the complexity of stimuli or resort to a nonmetric abstract coding of motion information

Bottlenecks of motion processing during a visual glance: the leaky flask model

YesWhere do the bottlenecks for information and attention lie when our visual system processes incoming stimuli? The human visual system encodes the incoming stimulus and transfers its contents into three major memory systems with increasing time scales, viz., sensory (or iconic) memory, visual short-term memory (VSTM), and long-term memory (LTM). It is commonly believed that the major bottleneck of information processing resides in VSTM. In contrast to this view, we show major bottlenecks for motion processing prior to VSTM. In the first experiment, we examined bottlenecks at the stimulus encoding stage through a partial-report technique by delivering the cue immediately at the end of the stimulus presentation. In the second experiment, we varied the cue delay to investigate sensory memory and VSTM. Performance decayed exponentially as a function of cue delay and we used the time-constant of the exponential-decay to demarcate sensory memory from VSTM. We then decomposed performance in terms of quality and quantity measures to analyze bottlenecks along these dimensions. In terms of the quality of information, two thirds to three quarters of the motion-processing bottleneck occurs in stimulus encoding rather than memory stages. In terms of the quantity of information, the motion-processing bottleneck is distributed, with the stimulus-encoding stage accounting for one third of the bottleneck. The bottleneck for the stimulus-encoding stage is dominated by the selection compared to the filtering function of attention. We also found that the filtering function of attention is operating mainly at the sensory memory stage in a specific manner, i.e., influencing only quantity and sparing quality. These results provide a novel and more complete understanding of information processing and storage bottlenecks for motion processing.Supported by R01 EY018165 and P30 EY007551 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Insights into motion perception by observer modelling

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Is the ability to identify deviations in multiple trajectories compromised by amblyopia?

NoAmblyopia results in a severe loss of positional information and in the ability to accurately enumerate objects (V. Sharma, D. M. Levi, & S. A. Klein, 2000). In this study, we asked whether amblyopia also disrupts the ability to track a near-threshold change in the trajectory of a single target amongst multiple similar potential targets. In the first experiment, we examined the precision for detecting a deviation in the linear motion trajectory of a dot by measuring deviation thresholds as a function of the number of moving trajectories (T). As in normal observers, we found that in both eyes of amblyopes, threshold increases steeply as T increases from 1 to 4. Surprisingly, for T = 1-4, thresholds were essentially identical in both eyes of the amblyopes and were similar to those of normal observers. In a second experiment, we measured the precision for detecting a deviation in the orientation of a static, bilinear "trajectory" by again measuring deviation thresholds (i.e., angle discrimination) as a function of the number of oriented line "trajectories" (T). Relative to the nonamblyopic eye, amblyopes show a marked threshold elevation for a static target when T = 1. However, thresholds increased with T with approximately the same slope as in their preferred eye and in the eyes of the normal controls. We conclude that while amblyopia disrupts static angle discrimination, amblyopic dynamic deviation detection thresholds are normal or very nearly so