Editorial: Using Noise to Characterize Vision

Auditory noise is a sound, a random variation in air pressure. More generally, random " noise " can be introduced into any stimulus, including a visual display. Noise added to the stimulus can probe the computations underlying perception of the stimulus. With power and precision, the noise, by restricting the information available, places fundamental constraints on attainable performance and processing strategy. WWII research on radar led to mathematical theorems about detectability of signals in noise, i.e., Signal Detection Theory (Peterson et al., 1954), which allow human performance to be expressed on an absolute scale of efficiency, 0–100% (Tanner and Birdsall, 1958; Pelli and Farell, 1999). Auditory noise revealed the channels of hearing in studies at Bell Labs that characterized how telephone line noise limits perception of speech (Fletcher, 1953). Studies of visual effects of photographic, x-ray, and video noise (reviewed in Pelli, 1981) led to pioneering work with artificially injected noise by Rose (1957), Stromeyer and Julesz (1972), and Solomon and Pelli (1994). Added visual noise has been widely used to characterize the computations underlying various visual tasks (e.g. Different kinds of noise probe different aspects of the computation. For instance, spectrally filtered noise is used to determine the frequencies relevant to a given visual task (e.g., letter identification, Solomon and Pelli, 1994). Noise masking of one attribute (e.g., in luminance, color, or texture) can reveal whether another attribute is processed separately (e. Noise image classification can reveal the visual features the observer uses to perform a visual task (e.g., Eckstein and Ahumada, 2002). Noise is also often used to characterize what limits sensitivity, such as internal noise Topic issue explores effective ways to use noise to probe visual function. " Noise " in perception experiments generally means unpredictable variation in some aspect of the stimulus. Typically, the stimulus consists of a luminance signal plus an unpredictable noise. Added noise is often white: A random sample, independent and identically distributed, is added to each pixel's luminance. The extent of the noise is restricted, or " localized, " by a window in space and time. The spatiotemporal spectrum of the noise can be restricted by bandpass filtering to a range of orientation and frequency. Added noise that varies across space is sometimes called " pixel noise. " Most of the studies in this Research Topic issue added noise to the signal; two studies randomly jittered parameters of the signal. In this …