Dataset Information

Paradoxical perception of object identity in visual motion.

ABSTRACT: In the course of perceptual organization, incomplete optical stimulation can evoke the experience of complete objects with distinct perceptual identities. According to a well-known principle of perceptual organization, stimulus parts separated by shorter spatial distances are more likely to appear as parts of the same perceptual identity. Whereas this principle of proximity has been confirmed in many studies of perceptual grouping in static displays, we show that it does not generalize to perception of object identity in dynamic displays, where the parts are separated by spatial and temporal distances. We use ambiguous displays which contain multiple moving parts and which can be perceived two ways: as two large objects that gradually change their size or as multiple smaller objects that rotate independent of one another. Grouping over long and short distances corresponds to the perception of the respectively large and small objects. We find that grouping over long distances is often preferred to grouping over short distances, against predictions of the proximity principle. Even though these effects are observed at high luminance contrast, we show that they are consistent with results obtained at the threshold of luminance contrast, in agreement with predictions of a theory of efficient motion measurement. This is evidence that the perception of object identity can be explained by a computational principle of neural economy rather than by the empirical principle of proximity.

SUBMITTER: Zharikova A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5548134 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Paradoxical perception of object identity in visual motion.

Zharikova Aleksandra A Gepshtein Sergei S van Leeuwen Cees C

Vision research 20170512

In the course of perceptual organization, incomplete optical stimulation can evoke the experience of complete objects with distinct perceptual identities. According to a well-known principle of perceptual organization, stimulus parts separated by shorter spatial distances are more likely to appear as parts of the same perceptual identity. Whereas this principle of proximity has been confirmed in many studies of perceptual grouping in static displays, we show that it does not generalize to percep ...[more]

PMID: 28456533

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Project description:The mid- and high-level visual properties supporting object perception in the ventral visual pathway are poorly understood. In the absence of well-specified theory, many groups have adopted a data-driven approach in which they progressively interrogate neural units to establish each unit's selectivity. Such methods are challenging in that they require search through a wide space of feature models and stimuli using a limited number of samples. To more rapidly identify higher-level features underlying human cortical object perception, we implemented a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging method in which visual stimuli are selected in real-time based on BOLD responses to recently shown stimuli. This work was inspired by earlier primate physiology work, in which neural selectivity for mid-level features in IT was characterized using a simple parametric approach (Hung et al., 2012). To extend such work to human neuroimaging, we used natural and synthetic object stimuli embedded in feature spaces constructed on the basis of the complex visual properties of the objects themselves. During fMRI scanning, we employed a real-time search method to control continuous stimulus selection within each image space. This search was designed to maximize neural responses across a pre-determined 1 cm(3) brain region within ventral cortex. To assess the value of this method for understanding object encoding, we examined both the behavior of the method itself and the complex visual properties the method identified as reliably activating selected brain regions. We observed: (1) Regions selective for both holistic and component object features and for a variety of surface properties; (2) Object stimulus pairs near one another in feature space that produce responses at the opposite extremes of the measured activity range. Together, these results suggest that real-time fMRI methods may yield more widely informative measures of selectivity within the broad classes of visual features associated with cortical object representation.

Dataset Information

Paradoxical perception of object identity in visual motion.

Publications

Paradoxical perception of object identity in visual motion.

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