Texture-shape coding and texture-surround inhibition of contour-shape coding in human vision.

The visual analysis of both the shapes of contours and the shapes of textured surfaces are crucial for object recognition. Although there is evidence that textures and contours are processed by different visual mechanisms, they are known to interact in the brain in important ways. Specifically, textures can inhibit the processing of contours that they surround. The aim of the project is to understand the mechanisms involved in texture-surround inhibition of contour-shape processing, as well as texture-shape encoding itself. We will investigate the spatial, temporal and photometric tuning properties of texture-surround-inhibition and texture-shape-encoding mechanisms. The experiments proposed in this project will employ a conventional psychophysical technique, the shape after-effect. We will also use detection and discrimination tasks and compare the results with those obtained using adaptation procedure. The importance of the project is that it will provide the first comprehensive account of the spatial, temporal and photometric tuning properties of texture-shape and texture-surround inhibition mechanisms.

Keywords:Texture, Contour, Shape

Disciplines:Biological and physiological psychology, Human experimental psychology, Animal experimental and comparative psychology, Applied psychology