New multivariate methods for the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data have enabled us to decode neural representations of visual information with unprecedented fidelity. But how do we know if humans make use of the information that we decode from the fMRI data for their behavioral response? In this chapter we propose a method for correlating the errors from fMRI decodin...

The visual system rapidly extracts information about objects from the cluttered natural environment. In five experiments we quantified the influence of orientation and semantics on the classification speed of objects in natural scenes, particularly with regard to object-context interactions. Natural scene photographs were presented in an object discrimination task, and pattern-masked with vario...

PURPOSE To assess the scene gist recognition in eyes with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and to study the relationship between scene recognition and macular function. METHODS Twenty-seven patients with age-related macular degeneration with a visual acuity lower than 20/50 and 17 age-matched controls were included. All patients underwent a visual field test, fundus autofluorescence, an...

Eye movements were monitored while participants performed a change detection task with images of natural scenes. An initial and a modified scene image were displayed in alternation, separated by a blank interval (flicker paradigm). In the modified image, a single target object was changed either by deleting that object from the scene or by rotating that object 90 degrees in depth. In Experiment...

The environments in which we live and the tasks we must perform to survive and reproduce have shaped the design of our perceptual systems through evolution and experience. Therefore, direct measurement of the statistical regularities in natural environments (scenes) has great potential value for advancing our understanding of visual perception. This review begins with a general discussion of th...

Humans and other primates move their eyes several times per second to foveate at different locations of a visual scene. What features of a scene guide eye movements in natural vision? We recorded eye movements of three monkeys during free exploration of natural scenes and propose a simple model to explain their dynamics. We use the spatial clustering of fixation positions to define the monkeys'...

Like humans, animals that use acoustic stimuli to perceive their world ought to be able to parse the auditory scene into functionally significant sounds. The ability to do so ought to have significant adaptive value when, for example, an animal can identify the sounds of a predator among other natural noises. In earlier work it was shown that a species of songbird, the European starling, can id...

Explorative eye movements specifically target some parts of a scene while ignoring others. Here, we investigate how local image structure--defined by spatial frequency contrast--and informative image content--defined by higher order image statistics-are weighted for the selection of fixation points. We measured eye movements of macaque monkeys freely viewing a set of natural and manipulated ima...

For virtual studio TV production, multi-site video conference applications using a virtual meeting room and for synthetic/natural hybrid coding according to the forthcoming ISO/MPEG-4 standard, a synthetic and a natural scene are mixed to generate a synthetic/natural hybrid image sequence. For realism, the illumination in both scenes should be identical. In this paper, the illumination of the n...