Touch engages visual spatial contextual processing

Contextual Spatial Analysis and Processing for Visual Surveillance Applications

Over the last few decades, computer vision has emerged as one of the predominant fields of research. Applications ranging from object detection, tracking and analysis (e.g. face recognition) have been widely explored by the research community. However, building commercial-grade systems is still a challenge, particularly in uncontrolled environments (e.g. train stations, outdoors), where the cap...

Contextual influences on visual processing.

The visual image formed on the retina represents an amalgam of visual scene properties, including the reflectances of surfaces, their relative positions, and the type of illumination. The challenge facing the visual system is to extract the "meaning" of the image by decomposing it into its environmental causes. For each local region of the image, that extraction of meaning is only possible if i...

Contextual Influences in Visual Processing

Definition Vision is the analysis of patterns in visual images with the view to understanding the objects and the physical processes in the world that generate them. Locally, visual patterns are highly ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations. Image structures surrounding the pattern being analyzed can provide additional constraints or context to disambiguate the interpretation. The re...

Spatial processing of touch in sighted and congenitally blind humans

Interpersonal touch suppresses visual processing of aversive stimuli

Social contact is essential for survival in human society. A previous study demonstrated that interpersonal contact alleviates pain-related distress by suppressing the activity of its underlying neural network. One explanation for this is that attention is shifted from the cause of distress to interpersonal contact. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a functional MRI (fMRI) study wherein eig...