Near-optimal integration of orientation information across saccades

E Ganmor, M S Landy and E P Simoncelli

Published in Journal of Vision, vol.15(16.8), pp. 1--12, Dec 2015.

DOI: 10.1167/15.16.8

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  • We perceive a stable environment despite the fact that visual information is essentially acquired in a sequence of snapshots separated by saccadic eye movements. The resolution of these snapshots varies, from high-resolution in the fovea to lower resolution in the periphery, and thus the formation of a stable percept presumably relies on the fusion of information acquired at different resolutions. To test if, and to what extent, foveal and peripheral information are integrated we examined human orientation-discrimination performance across saccadic eye movements. We found that humans perform best when an oriented target is visible both before (peripherally) and after a saccade (foveally), suggesting that humans integrate the two views. Integration relied on eye movements, as we found no evidence of integration when the target was artificially moved during stationary viewing. Perturbation analysis revealed that humans combine the two views using a weighted sum, with weights assigned based on the relative precision of foveal and peripheral representations, as predicted by ideal observer models. However, our subjects displayed a systematic over-weighting of the fovea, relative to the ideal observer, indicating that human integration across saccades is slightly sub-optimal.
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