The Effects of Stimulus Variability in Natural Visual Scenes

Detailed Summary

The natural visual environment is complex and rich with different stimuli and features. The visual system must constantly extract behaviorally relevant visual information from an abundance of irrelevant information in the visual scene. To complicate matters further, the visual feature or stimulus that is most relevant at any given moment can change quickly and frequently in realistic visual environments. The mechanisms by which task-relevant information guides perceptual behavior are not fully understood. In this study, psychophysical experiments will be used to measure participants' ability to discriminate the horizontal position of a central object within a complex, natural visual scene, as well as to measure how that ability is affected by within-trial variability in the features of background objects in the scene. The goal of this study is to investigate the overarching prediction that the visual system extracts task-relevant information in a manner that reflects realistically complex visual environments in which the stimuli change quickly and frequently. Specifically, this study will test the hypothesis that task-irrelevant variability in the scene affects participants' ability to discriminate the visual feature that is relevant to the task at hand.

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