Capacity limits and how the visual system copes with them

Rosenholtz, R.


Abstract

A visual system cannot process everything with full fidelity, nor, in a given moment, perform all possible visual tasks. Rather, it must lose some information, and prioritize some tasks over others. The human visual system has developed a number of strategies for dealing with its limited capacity. This paper reviews recent evidence for one strategy: encoding the visual input in terms of a rich set of local image statistics, where the local regions grow — and the representation becomes less precise — with distance from fixation. The explanatory power of this proposed encoding scheme has implications for another proposed strategy for dealing with limited capacity: that of selective attention, which gates visual processing so that the visual system momentarily processes some objects, features, or locations at the expense of others. A lossy peripheral encoding offers an alternative explanation for a number of phenomena used to study selective attention. Based on lessons learned from studying peripheral vision, this paper proposes a different characterization of capacity limits as limits on decision complexity. A general-purpose decision process may deal with such limits by “cutting corners” when the task becomes too complicated.

Information

title:
Capacity limits and how the visual system copes with them
author:
Rosenholtz,
R.
citation:
Electronic Imaging (Proc. Human Vision & Elect. Imaging, 2017), 16, 8-23
shortcite:
HVEI
year:
2017
created:
2017-03-28
summary:
attentionhvei2017
keyword:
rosenholtz,
visstat,
crowding,
attention
pdf:
http://persci.mit.edu/_media/pub_pdfs/RosenholtzHVEI2017.pdf
type:
publication
 
publications/attentionhvei2017.txt · Last modified: 2018/05/10 09:36 by rosenholtz
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