Reuther Josephine, Chakravarthi Ramakrishna, Martinovic Jasna
School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK.
Georg-Elias-Müller Institut für Psychologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
Proc Biol Sci. 2025 Sep;292(2055):20251107. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2025.1107. Epub 2025 Sep 17.
It is essential for object recognition that visual information is appropriately combined. To explain stages of perceptual organization that group elements into contours, the concept of has been invoked. Local elements within the boundaries of an association field are grouped to give rise to the perception of a contour if they are appropriately aligned, reasonably similar and close. However, the size of this spatial window remains unclear, as well as how this changes with visual field location. To address this, we studied the combined influence of eccentricity and inter-element spacing on contour detection. Our findings indicate a clear difference in the processing of contours between the parafovea and the periphery. Contour integration in parafoveal regions is efficient and highly stable across a wide range of inter-element spacings and levels of orientation noise. In the periphery, efficient integration is only observed for elements close enough to fall within adjacent receptive fields, while increased inter-element spacings and orientation changes lead to a failure of contour integration. We conclude that two distinct mechanisms underlie contour integration, each with its own spatial extent and tolerance to noise-with the efficient, association field-like mechanism being a characteristic of central vision.
视觉信息的恰当组合对于物体识别至关重要。为了解释将元素分组为轮廓的知觉组织阶段，人们引入了关联场的概念。如果关联场内边界内的局部元素排列适当、相似度合理且距离较近，它们就会被分组以产生轮廓感知。然而，这个空间窗口的大小尚不清楚，以及它如何随视野位置而变化。为了解决这个问题，我们研究了偏心率和元素间间距对轮廓检测的综合影响。我们的研究结果表明，中央凹旁区域和周边区域在轮廓处理上存在明显差异。在中央凹旁区域，轮廓整合在广泛的元素间间距和方向噪声水平范围内都是高效且高度稳定的。在周边区域，只有当元素足够接近以至于落入相邻感受野时，才能观察到高效整合，而元素间间距的增加和方向变化会导致轮廓整合失败。我们得出结论，轮廓整合有两种不同的机制，每种机制都有其自身的空间范围和对噪声的耐受性——高效的、类似关联场的机制是中央视觉的一个特征。
