The influence of natural image statistics on upright orientation judgements

Emily J. A-Izzeddin; Jason B. Mattingley; William J. Harrison

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105631

Back

The influence of natural image statistics on upright orientation judgements

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

The influence of natural image statistics on upright orientation judgements

Emily J. A-Izzeddin, Jason B. Mattingley and William J. Harrison

Cognition, Vol.242, pp.1-12

2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105631

PMID: 37820487

Files and links (2)

pdf

The influence of natural image statistics on upright orientation judgements4.00 MBDownload View

Published VersionCC BY V4.0, Open Access

url

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105631View

Published Version

Abstract

naturalistic images

visual perception

image statistics

computational modelling

Humans have well-documented priors for many features present in nature that guide visual perception. Despite being putatively grounded in the statistical regularities of the environment, scene priors are frequently violated due to the inherent variability of visual features from one scene to the next. However, these repeated violations do not appreciably challenge visuo-cognitive function, necessitating the broad use of priors in conjunction with context-specific information. We investigated the trade-off between participants' internal expectations formed from both longer-term priors and those formed from immediate contextual information using a perceptual inference task and naturalistic stimuli. Notably, our task required participants to make perceptual inferences about naturalistic images using their own internal criteria, rather than making comparative judgements. Nonetheless, we show that observers' performance is well approximated by a model that makes inferences using a prior for low-level image statistics, aggregated over many images. We further show that the dependence on this prior is rapidly re-weighted against contextual information, even when misleading. Our results therefore provide insight into how apparent high-level interpretations of scene appearances follow from the most basic of perceptual processes, which are grounded in the statistics of natural images.

Details

Title: The influence of natural image statistics on upright orientation judgements
Authors: Emily J. A-Izzeddin (Corresponding Author) - The University of Queensland
Jason B. Mattingley (Author) - The University of Queensland
William J. Harrison (Author) - The University of Queensland
Publication details: Cognition, Vol.242, pp.1-12
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date published: 2024
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105631
ISSN: 1873-7838; 0010-0277
PMID: 37820487
Data Availability: Behavioural data, as well as experimental and analysis code are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/7mqpw/?view_only=de2f4fed909043f6aed2927ee056d1e5
Grants: The influence of naturalistic context on visual short-term memory, DE190100136, Australian Research Council (Australia, Canberra) - ARC
Understanding the role of predictive coding in visual processing: from neural circuits to whole brain systems, 2010141, National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia, Canberra) - NHMRC
Organisation Unit: Healthy Ageing Research Cluster; School of Health - Psychology
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99996797402621
Output Type: Journal article

Metrics

2 File views/ downloads

26 Record Views

5 Times Cited - Web of Science

See more details

InCites Highlights

These are selected metrics from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool, related to this output

Web Of Science research areas: Psychology, Experimental