Abstract
Sensory processing necessitates discarding some information in service of preserving and reformatting more behaviorally relevant information. Sensory neurons seem to achieve this by responding selectively to particular combinations of features in their inputs, while averaging over or ignoring irrelevant combinations. Here, we expose the perceptual implications of this tradeoff between selectivity and invariance, using stimuli and tasks that explicitly reveal their opposing effects on discrimination performance. We generate texture stimuli with statistics derived from natural photographs, and ask observers to perform two different tasks: Discrimination between images drawn from families with different statistics, and discrimination between image samples with identical statistics. For both tasks, the performance of an ideal observer improves with stimulus size. In contrast, humans become better at family discrimination but worse at sample discrimination. We demonstrate through simulations that these behaviors arise naturally in an observer model that relies on a common set of physiologically plausible local statistical measurements for both tasks.
Highlights
Sensory processing necessitates discarding some information in service of preserving and reformatting more behaviorally relevant information
Such statistical summarization can be loosely associated with the pooling behaviors seen in neurons at different stages of the hierarchy
As a substrate for both our model of peripheral vision and for generating experimental stimuli, we utilized a set of summary statistics previously developed for the representation of visual texture[23]
Summary
Sensory processing necessitates discarding some information in service of preserving and reformatting more behaviorally relevant information. A number of authors have posited that the visual system extracts a set of local summary statistics from visual images, and discards the details from which these summaries are computed[11,15,16,17,18] Such statistical summarization can be loosely associated with the pooling behaviors seen in neurons at different stages of the hierarchy (e.g., the integration over bipolar afferents seen in retinal ganglion cells[19]; the combination over simple cells of differing phase or spatial location seen in V1 complex cells[20], the combination over direction-selective complex cells with different direction preferences seen in MT pattern cells[21]). It is not obvious why the visual system should discard this information, and coding efficiency (at least, in its simplest form) does not seem to provide an answer
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