Coppola D M, Purves H R, McCoy A N, Purves D
Department of Neurobiology, Box 3209, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC 27710, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1998 Mar 31;95(7):4002-6. doi: 10.1073/pnas.95.7.4002.
In both humans and experimental animals, the ability to perceive contours that are vertically or horizontally oriented is superior to the perception of oblique angles. There is, however, no consensus about the developmental origins or functional basis of this phenomenon. Here, we report the analysis of a large library of digitized scenes using image processing with orientation-sensitive filters. Our results show a prevalence of vertical and horizontal orientations in indoor, outdoor, and even entirely natural settings. Because visual experience is known to influence the development of visual cortical circuitry, we suggest that this real world anisotropy is related to the enhanced ability of humans and other animals to process contours in the cardinal axes, perhaps by stimulating the development of a greater amount of visual circuitry devoted to processing vertical and horizontal contours.
在人类和实验动物中，感知垂直或水平方向轮廓的能力优于对斜角的感知。然而，关于这种现象的发育起源或功能基础尚无共识。在这里，我们报告了使用方向敏感滤波器进行图像处理对大量数字化场景库的分析。我们的结果表明，垂直和水平方向在室内、室外甚至完全自然的环境中都很普遍。由于已知视觉经验会影响视觉皮层回路的发育，我们认为这种现实世界的各向异性与人类和其他动物处理基本轴上轮廓的能力增强有关，这可能是通过刺激更多专门用于处理垂直和水平轮廓的视觉回路的发育来实现的。
