Peripheral object recognition in natural images: Effect of window size M W Wijntjes1, R Rosenholtz2 |
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1Perceptual Intelligence Lab, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands |
| Research suggests that, due to capacity limitations, the visual system pools information over sizable regions, which grow linearly with eccentricity. In many psychophysical experiments, this causes pooling over uninformative “flankers”, leading to crowding. However, under natural circumstances, objects are typically surrounded by informative context. In normal viewing, how does the harmful effect of pooling over a large, potentially complex region (i.e. crowding) trade off against the beneficial effect of additional context? We conducted a recognition experiment in which we varied the size of the contextual region surrounding the object. 656 objects were randomly selected from a fully annotated picture database (SUN 2012). Objects were presented at 10 degrees from the fovea, and subtended 4 degrees visual angle. The objects appeared within a circular cropping of the original picture, with radius varying from 1 (object size) to 5 times the object size. Recognition increased monotonically from 45% to 71%, showing no detrimental effect of increasing the surround to include the typical “crowding zone”. These results suggest that the visual system, faced with capacity limitations, has made a reasonable compromise. On average, for real world identification, contextual information more than makes up for the loss of information underlying crowding. |
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