Object-based effects of attentional selection due to low-level curvature-based perceptual singularities
- Project number: 202-08-05
- Students: Liana Diesendruck
- Supervisor: Ohad Ben-Shahar
The analysis of texture patterns and their segregation is at the heart of visual information processing. More than two decades of research into orientation-based texture segregation have focused, however, on a rather constrained set of stimuli that led to straight forward models of segregation based on abrupt changes in the texture's dominant feature (Just think of a display in which the brightness, color, texture, or orientation change abruptly along some line). However, a recent novel set of visual stimuli has demonstrated that segregation can occur even without such abrupt changes. In particular, it was shown that textures defined by orientation can exhibit very salient boundary-like percept even without any outstanding change in the dominant orientation. But do these 'perceptual singularities' manifest themselves beyond the direct perceptual experience? In this work we examine the interaction if this low level perceptual phenomenon wit h the process of attention. Specifically, we show that despite no abrupt change in texture features, perceptual singularities in orientation-defined textures can affect how the efficiency of the spread of attention and the ability to discriminate between two simple shapes in a way that no spatial factors can explain.
