Year-end Sale % OFF 
Abstract
Disruptions of natural texture appearance are known to negatively impact performance in texture discrimination tasks, for example, such that contrast-negated textures, synthetic textures, and textures depicting abstract art are processed less efficiently than natural textures. Presently, we examined how visual ERP responses (the P1 and the N1 in particular) were affected by violations of natural texture appearance. We presented participants with images depicting either natural textures or synthetic textures made from the original stimuli. Both stimulus types were additionally rendered either in positive or negative contrast. These appearance manipulations (negation and texture synthesis) preserve a range of low-level features, but also disrupt higher-order aspects of texture appearance. We recorded continuous EEG while participants completed a same/different image discrimination task using these images and measured both the P1 and N1 components over occipital recording sites. While the P1 exhibited no sensitivity to either contrast polarity or real/synthetic appearance, the N1 was sensitive to both deviations from natural appearance. Polarity reversal and synthetic appearance affected the N1 latency differently, however, suggesting a differential impact on processing. Our results suggest that stages of visual processing indexed by the P1 and N1 are sensitive to high-order statistical regularities in natural textures and also suggest that distinct violations of natural appearance impact neural responses differently.
Highlights
Texture perception supports a range of important visual functions
Texture perception and texture representations are described in terms of “summary statistics” that the visual system uses to describe the appearance of a texture
These same statistics vary differently across viewing conditions and illumination changes as a function of texture category and this difference in the invariance of contrast statistics across ecologically relevant image transformation is evident in visual event-related potentials (ERPs) [27]. This result suggests that visual processing is sensitive to regularities in natural textures; in this case, the distribution of unoriented contrast energy. We suggest that both these results and the aforementioned fMRI results suggest that the responses of visual areas such as V1 and V2 are tuned to natural texture statistics and that sensitivity to textures that deviate from the statistics of the natural world may be evident at visual ERP components measured over the occipital cortex
Summary
Texture perception supports a range of important visual functions. Image segmentation [1] and material perception, for example, both rely to some degree on texture perception [2] as do some aspects of shape perception [3,4]. An even broader range of visual functions including visual search, the visual processing of crowded stimulus arrays in the periphery, and other tasks that are typically accomplished in the visual periphery have been successfully described vis-à-vis texture representations of appearance [5,6]. Texture perception and texture representations are described in terms of “summary statistics” that the visual system uses to describe the appearance of a texture. Though a range of feature vocabularies have been developed to account for performance in various tasks, texture representations typically.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
