A visual search asymmetry for plaids
Solomon, J. A. ORCID: 0000-0001-9976-4788, Morgan, M. J. & Chubb, C. F. (2025).
A visual search asymmetry for plaids.
Perception,
doi: 10.1177/03010066251340285
Abstract
Search asymmetry has been called a “litmus test” for basic visual features. The letter Q is thought to contain a basic feature because (i) it can be found quickly, no matter how many O's it is hiding amongst and (ii) it is much harder to find an O amongst Q's. We tested the possibility that a basic visual feature is created when two perpendicular Gabor patterns are superimposed to form a “plaid.” We found relatively large effects of set size on reaction time whenever participants tried to find a Gabor hiding among plaids. Set-size effects were smaller when participants tried to find a 2- or 4-cycle-per-degree plaid that was hiding among its component Gabors. The implication is that these plaids contain a basic visual feature, which is not present in its component Gabors. This feature may be an intrinsic two-dimensionality that is extracted from the visual intensity map. Mixed-frequency plaids did not pop out from their component Gabors. This last result suggests that the visual system separates intrinsically two-dimensional image regions (e.g., corners and junctions) from intrinsically one-dimensional image regions (e.g., straight edges) after the scene is segregated into parallel spatial frequency channels.
Publication Type: | Article |
---|---|
Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Publisher Keywords: | visual search, attentional capture, segmentation, texture |
Subjects: | R Medicine > RE Ophthalmology |
Departments: | School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Optometry & Visual Sciences |
SWORD Depositor: |
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (835kB) | Preview
Export
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year