Back
Bloch's law and the dynamics of feature fusion.
Journal article

Bloch's law and the dynamics of feature fusion.

  • Scharnowski F Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. Frank.Scharnowski@epfl.ch
  • Hermens F
  • Herzog MH
  • 2007-08-07
Published in:
  • Vision research. - 2007
Adult
Female
Form Perception
Humans
Lighting
Male
Models, Neurological
Photic Stimulation
Psychophysics
Time Factors
Time Perception
Visual Cortex
English How the visual brain integrates temporally dispersed information is an open question. Often, it is assumed that the visual system simply sums light over a certain period of time (e.g. Bloch's law). However, in feature fusion, information presented later dominates, suggesting complex temporal dynamics that cannot be described by simple energy summation. For example, if two verniers are presented in rapid succession at the same location, they are not perceived individually but they fuse to one single vernier. The perceived offset of the fused vernier is a combination of the offsets of the two presented verniers, with the later one dominating. Here, we show that indeed, Bloch's law does not hold across verniers in a sequence. However, changes in the luminance of a single vernier can be compensated for by changes in its duration in accordance with Bloch's law. We present a simple model to demonstrate that these findings can be explained by decaying neural activation.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/180241
Statistics
Document views: 43 File downloads: