icevislab

icevislab, 8 months ago to random

Preprint🚨 "Objects, faces, and spaces: Organizational principles of visual object perception as evidenced by individual differences in behavior" by Heida Maria Sigurdardottir (now mostly on Bluesky @heidasigurdar.bsky.social) and Inga María Ólafsdóttir. This one only took checks notes two and a half years... https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560383v1 THREAD :brain_loading:

What are the diagnostic dimensions on which objects truly differ visually, and do these dimensions provide the foundation for the organizational principles of visual object perception as evidenced by individual differences in behavior?

Using data-driven methods, we utilized a deep convolutional neural network to construct a visual object space extracted from deep layer activations for a reference set of objects. The first two dimensions of object space capture attributes that distinguish one object from another and may map onto the anatomical organization of the ventral visual stream of non-human primates, but its existence in humans is unclear. If object space underlies human visual cognition, this should have a measurable effect on people's object discrimination.

We focused on the so-called face quadrant (stubby-animate quadrant) of object space, as there are considerable individual differences in face discrimination abilities, and a lively debate has revolved around whether such abilities are specific to faces. In this preregistered study, we collected data from a large (N=511) heterogeneous sample to amplify individual differences in visual discrimination. We primarily targeted people with self-declared face recognition abilities on opposite sides of the spectrum, ranging from poor to excellent face recognizers. We then administered a visual foraging task where faces and other objects had to be discriminated. Stimuli were carefully picked out of tens of thousands of images to either match or not match with the coordinates of faces in object space.

Results showed that face discrimination did not rely on completely domain-specific abilities but also tapped into mechanisms that supported other object discrimination. Specifically, people who struggled with telling apart faces also had difficulties with discriminating other objects from the face quadrant of object space.

We suggest that fundamental visual properties – here approximated by two primary dimensions of an object space captured by CNNs – are automatically extracted by the human visual system during an initial bottom-up sweep.

These properties may guide the selection of appropriate methods of further object processing, e.g., global/configural/holistic vs. piecemeal/feature-based processing, axis-based shape processing, structural representations, image-based/view-based representations.

To the best of our knowledge, the current study provides the first behavioral evidence for the existence of an object space in human visual cognition.

Preregistration: osf.io/q5ne8
Data and analysis code: osf.io/2jn6c/

Questions and comments, includings suggestions for references to additional literature, are welcome: heidasi@hi.is

icevislab, 1 year ago to random

Trying a new productivity hack.

icevislab, 1 year ago to Neuroscience

Just woke up from my first ever conference nightmare. Couldn't find my room, had to wear mismatched socks, had to leave my kid unattended, lost my glove, my session was in a different day than I thought, arrived too late to it, moderator was giving me the evil eye, and my poster had printed wrong so it was an A4 size with tiny tiny letters and figures just at the top. BUT the poster format was kind of brilliant. The poster was attached to a stick and then all presenters walked around, waving their poster around like a flag. Much more effective in attracting attention I am sure. We should change this. #Petition #Posters #CognitiveScience #Neuroscience #VisionScience #CognitivePsychology #Conferences #VSS2023 #ECVP2023

icevislab, 1 year ago to random

Are you a researcher working on visual cognition or some related field? Please drop your Mastodon handle here and we will follow you. Also feel free to point us to other accounts.
#VisualAttention #EyeMovements #ObjectPerception #FacePerception #VisualMemory #VisualStatistics #VisualPlasticity #VisualPerception #VisionScience #CognitivePsychology #CognitiveScience #CognitiveNeuroscience