Contrast Negation and Texture Synthesis Differentially Disrupt Natural Texture Appearance

Benjamin Balas

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00515

Abstract

Natural textures have characteristic image statistics that make them discriminable from unnatural textures. For example, both contrast negation and texture synthesis alter the appearance of natural textures even though each manipulation preserves some features while disrupting others. Here, we examined the extent to which contrast negation and texture synthesis each introduce or remove critical perceptual features for discriminating unnatural textures from natural textures. We find that both manipulations remove information that observers use for distinguishing natural textures from transformed versions of the same patterns, but do so in different ways. Texture synthesis removes information that is relevant for discrimination in both abstract patterns and ecologically valid textures, and we also observe a category-dependent asymmetry for identifying an “oddball” real texture among synthetic distractors. Contrast negation exhibits no such asymmetry, and also does not impact discrimination performance in abstract patterns. We discuss our results in the context of the visual system’s tuning to ecologically relevant patterns and other results describing sensitivity to higher-order statistics in texture patterns.

Highlights

Texture perception supports a wide range of visual tasks (Landy, under review)
The synthesized arrays are harder for participants, but performance with the original textures was already quite poor, leading to an interaction based on the size of an effect in the same direction as we obtained with fruit/vegetable textures
Contrast negation does not appear to induce any changes in appearance that alter the homogeneity of texture patches

Summary

Introduction

Texture perception supports a wide range of visual tasks (Landy, under review). Recent results suggest that the nature of texture representations (and their limitations) may explain performance in crowding tasks (Balas et al, 2009), visual search (Rosenholtz et al, 2012b); and provide a language for describing the effects of visual attention (Rosenholtz et al, 2012a). The transformation implemented by processing an image via texture representations may be the basis of a distinct mode of processing that governs much of what see in the visual periphery (Freeman and Simoncelli, 2011; Rosenholtz, 2011) leading to a wide range of effects that follow from “seeing sidelong” (Lettvin, 1976)

Methods

Results

Conclusion