Université de Lille, CNRS, UMR 9193-SCALab-Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, Lille, France.
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven Kulak, Kortrijk, Belgium.
J Vis. 2024 Jul 2;24(7):15. doi: 10.1167/jov.24.7.15.
Humans can estimate the number of visually presented items without counting. In most studies on numerosity perception, items are uniformly distributed across displays, with identical distributions in central and eccentric parts. However, the neural and perceptual representation of the human visual field differs between the fovea and the periphery. For example, in peripheral vision, there are strong asymmetries with regard to perceptual interferences between visual items. In particular, items arranged radially usually interfere more strongly with each other than items arranged tangentially (the radial-tangential anisotropy). This has been shown for crowding (the deleterious effect of clutter on target identification) and redundancy masking (the reduction of the number of perceived items in repeating patterns). In the present study, we tested how the radial-tangential anisotropy of peripheral vision impacts numerosity perception. In four experiments, we presented displays with varying numbers of discs that were predominantly arranged radially or tangentially, forming strong and weak interference conditions, respectively. Participants were asked to report the number of discs. We found that radial displays were reported as less numerous than tangential displays for all radial and tangential manipulations: weak (Experiment 1), strong (Experiment 2), and when using displays with mixed contrast polarity discs (Experiments 3 and 4). We propose that numerosity perception exhibits a significant radial-tangential anisotropy, resulting from local spatial interactions between items.
人类可以在不数数的情况下估计视觉呈现的项目数量。在大多数关于数量感知的研究中，项目均匀分布在显示器上，中央和外围部分的分布相同。然而，人类视野的神经和感知表示在中央凹和周围之间存在差异。例如，在周边视觉中，视觉项目之间存在强烈的感知干扰不对称。特别是，径向排列的项目通常比切向排列的项目（径向-切向各向异性）相互干扰更强。这已经在拥挤（杂乱对目标识别的有害影响）和冗余掩蔽（重复模式中感知到的项目数量减少）中得到了证明。在本研究中，我们测试了外围视觉的径向-切向各向异性如何影响数量感知。在四个实验中，我们呈现了具有不同数量的圆盘的显示器，这些圆盘主要呈径向或切向排列，分别形成强干扰和弱干扰条件。要求参与者报告圆盘的数量。我们发现，对于所有的径向和切向操作，径向显示的数量都比切向显示的数量少：弱（实验 1）、强（实验 2），以及当使用具有混合对比度极性圆盘的显示时（实验 3 和 4）。我们提出，数量感知表现出显著的径向-切向各向异性，这是由于项目之间的局部空间相互作用。
