How are visual scenes represented in the brain during categorization? We acquired magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from nine healthy subjects who participated in a rapid natural scene categorization task. Scenes were presented in two different perspectives (aerial vs. terrestrial) and two different orientations (upright vs. inverted). We applied multivariate pattern classification to categoriz...

In four experiments, we examined the hypothesis that a presaccadic extrafoveal preview of an object normally affects subsequent postsaccadic foveal processing of the object. On each trial, viewers inspected an array of three objects and were instructed to remember one object characteristic (in-depth orientation, image-plane orientation, color, or semantic category). During the saccade to one of...

The perceived orientation of objects, gravity, and the body are biased to the left. Whether this leftward bias is attributable to biases in sensing or processing vestibular, visual, and body sense cues has never been assessed directly. The orientation in which characters are most easily recognized--the perceived upright (PU)--can be well predicted from a weighted vector sum of these sensory cue...

Pedestrian detection in images is a topic that has been studied extensively, but existing detectors designed for perspective do not perform as successfully on taken with top-view fisheye cameras, mainly due to the orientation variation of people such images. In our proposed approach, several views are generated from image and then concatenated form composite image. As pedestrians this more like...

Inversion and photographic negation both impair face recognition. Inversion seems to disrupt processing of the spatial relationship between facial features ('relational' processing) which normally occurs with upright faces and which facilitates their recognition. It remains unclear why negation affects recognition. To find out if negation impairs relational processing, we investigated whether n...

An important trend in the early evolution of mammals was the shift from a sprawling stance, whereby the legs are held in a more abducted position, to a parasagittal one, in which the legs extend more downward. After that transition, many mammals shifted from a crouching stance to a more upright one. It is hypothesized that one consequence of these transitions was a decrease in the total mechani...

Our perceptual systems are shaped by our natural environment. Statistical studies on natural scenes have provided important insights to the development of simple cell receptive fields ? and the connectivity among orientation selective neurons in the primary visual cortex 1,25, 28. Here, we extended such study to the neural encoding of statistical regularities of 3D surfaces in natural scenes. A...

Three experiments investigated the frame of reference used in memory to represent vertical spatial layouts perceivable from a single viewpoint. We tested for the selection of three different reference systems: the body orientation, the visual vertical of the surrounding room, and the direction of gravity. Participants learned and retrieved differently colored objects on a vertical board with bo...

Congenital prosopagnosia (cPA) is a severe disorder in recognising familiar faces, a human characteristic that is presumably innate, without any macro-spatial brain anomalies. Following the idea that cPA is based on deficits of configural face processing, we used a speeded grotesqueness decision task with thatcherised faces, since the Thatcher illusion can serve as a test of configural disrupti...