Tribhawan Kumar

Depth discrimination of a line is improved by adding other nearby lines

Depth discrimination thresholds are shown to be lowered by up to a factor of 10 when a few reference lines are added to a stimulus containing a single isolated test line. Four reference lines are better than two, which are better than one, and the improvement in performance is greater when the test line lies between the two reference lines in depth. Stereoacuity for the relative depth of a target line, relative to other nearby reference lines, is shown to be insensitive to changes of disparity of the whole pattern of up to about +/- 5 arc min and is only weakly sensitive to larger displacements of up to +/- 10 arc min.

Influence of remote objects on local depth perception

The perceived relative depth of two test dots displayed within the fovea is shown to be influenced by other features in the surrounding area. These features can be as far apart as 51 deg and can have relative disparities as large as 20 deg, much larger than the disparities of the test dots. Since this effect is seen for stimuli presented for 100 msec or less, changes in direction of gaze cannot play a role. The effect varies inversely as the spatial separation between the test dots and the remote features, and is insensitive to the relative disparities of these remote features when they are greater than 2 deg. Observers sometimes differ significantly from each other in their responses to various configurations of the outlying features. This appears to rule out response mechanisms which depend only on the stimulus; some characteristics of the observer must be involved in determining the response. For these briefly presented stimuli, observers are unable to report accurately the relative depth of the central foveated test items if they are also required to report the depths of distant peripheral features.

Spontaneous Local Gamma Oscillation Selectively Enhances Neural Network Responsiveness

Synchronized oscillation is very commonly observed in many neuronal systems and might play an important role in the response properties of the system. We have studied how the spontaneous oscillatory activity affects the responsiveness of a neuronal network, using a neural network model of the visual cortex built from Hodgkin-Huxley type excitatory (E-) and inhibitory (I-) neurons. When the isotropic local E-I and I-E synaptic connections were sufficiently strong, the network commonly generated gamma frequency oscillatory firing patterns in response to random feed-forward (FF) input spikes. This spontaneous oscillatory network activity injects a periodic local current that could amplify a weak synaptic input and enhance the networks responsiveness. When E-E connections were added, we found that the strength of oscillation can be modulated by varying the FF input strength without any changes in single neuron properties or interneuron connectivity. The response modulation is proportional to the oscillation strength, which leads to self-regulation such that the cortical network selectively amplifies various FF inputs according to its strength, without requiring any adaptation mechanism. We show that this selective cortical amplification is controlled by E-E cell interactions. We also found that this response amplification is spatially localized, which suggests that the responsiveness modulation may also be spatially selective. This suggests a generalized mechanism by which neural oscillatory activity can enhance the selectivity of a neural network to FF inputs.

Stereopsis due to luminance differences in the two eyes

A local region in an image is seen as slanted when the two eyes are shown different luminance values in that region. The steepness of the slant depends upon the size of the region and the difference in the luminance values in the two eyes. Three examples where this phenomenon influences depth perception are given: (1) stereopsis without corresponding binocular luminance edges is shown to be a limiting case of the phenomenon; (2) edges less than 1 min arc apart can be seen in relative depth with respect to each other; and (3) regions that appear transparent or translucent can be seen in depth despite having all the luminance edges at zero disparity in simple stereo images.

Multiple matching of features in simple stereograms

Simple stereograms are used to show that the binocular matching of closely spaced vertical lines can be changed by horizontally connecting some of the vertical lines. The matching that is seen can be gradually changed by incremental modifications to simple visual quantities like the luminance contrast of a local region, or the density of the connecting horizontal lines. For some values of these visual quantities the depth seen is unstable which suggests that the mechanisms responsible for resolving matching ambiguities might be intrinsically dynamic. These changes in binocular matching can also be used to show a hysteresis-like effect in stereopsis. Many of the constraints like ordering, cohesivity, and uniqueness often used in algorithms for resolving ambiguities are perhaps too limiting to allow either such dynamics or the processing of transparent or partially occluded surfaces.

Depth discrimination of a crowded line is better when it is more luminant than the lines crowding it

Observers usually cannot discriminate the relative depth of a crowded feature with respect to crowding features about 2 arc min distant if all the features have the same luminance. However, stereo thresholds significantly less than 20 arc sec are obtained when the crowded feature is about twice as luminant as the features crowding it. The thresholds depend only upon the ratio of the luminance of the target feature to the luminance of the crowding features and are independent of the absolute luminance of the features. With further increase in the relative luminance of the target feature, the performance eventually deteriorates and this deterioration is not due to difficulty in seeing the features which were individually clearly visible for all the luminances tested. The closest spacing of local crowded features that still allows good stereo discrimination is about the same as the spatial resolution attainable for many luminance-based non-stereo tasks.

Edges and line minimally mask width discrimination of rectangles

Abstract We studied the effect of various attributes of masking on size discrimination. We show that contrary to the assumptions of many models, observers can accurately compare the width of a test rectangle shown for only 3 ms to the width of a control rectangle shown for 1 s . We also found that masks even one-tenth the size of the test rectangle were as effective as masks twice the size of the test rectangle, and that edges and lines per se were only minimally effective as masks.