Representation of mean spatial frequency

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Our visual system may utilize the summary statistics such as mean sizes of a visual array in a scene. However, the series of research on summary statistics did not show whether our visual system indeed represented those statistical properties. Current study investigated whether our visual system had representation of the mean size by measuring the adaptation effect at the mean of spatial frequencies (SFs). We first measured the perceived strength of SFs, and then tested whether the mean SF was to be estimated by that function. We found that a psychometric function with an exponent of 1.13 described the magnitude of SFs, and that mean SF estimations were close to a geometric mean. Lastly, we tested whether or not the visual system represented the mean SF by using adaptation methods. The contrast threshold at the mean SF of two different SFs was significantly elevated when the pair of adaptor SFs was presented intermittently during adaptation. These results suggest that the visual system automatically extracts and represents mean SF.