Biomedical subjects

R Beau Lotto

Publications and source records attributed to R Beau Lotto.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Comparison of Bayesian and empirical ranking approaches to visual perception.

Much current vision research is predicated on the idea--and a rapidly growing body of evidence--that visual percepts are generated according to the empirical significance of light stimuli rather than their physical characteristics. As a result, an increasing number of investigators have asked how visual perception can be rationalized in these terms. Here, we compare two different theoretical frameworks for predicting what observers actually see in response to visual stimuli: Bayesian decision theory and empirical ranking theory. Deciding which of these approaches has greater merit is likely to determine how the statistical operations that apparently underlie visual perception are eventually understood.

Bayes Theorem↗

PubMed2005

Bees encode behaviorally significant spectral relationships in complex scenes to resolve stimulus ambiguity.

Bees, like humans, can continue to see a surface from its color even when the scene's global illuminant changes (which is a phenomenon called color constancy). It is not known, however, whether they can also generate color-constant behavior in more natural complex scenes that are lit by multiple lights simultaneously, conditions in which most computational models of color constancy fail. To test whether they can indeed solve this more complex problem, bumblebees were raised in a highly controlled, yet ecological relevant environment consisting of a matrix of 64 artificial flowers under four spatially distinct lights. As in nature, the bees had no direct access to spectral information about the illuminants or flowers. Furthermore, the background of all of the flowers in the matrix was black, independent of illumination. The stimulus information presented to the bee was, therefore, far more constrained than that normally experienced in nature. And yet, bees learned to identify the rewarded flowers in each differently illuminated region of the matrix, even when the illumination of one of the regions was switched with one the bees had not previously experienced. These results suggest that bees can generate color-constant behavior by encoding empirically significant contrast relationships between statistically dependent, but visually distinct, stimulus elements of scenes.

Animals↗

PubMed2005

Seeing the light: illumination as a contextual cue to color choice behavior in bumblebees.

The principal challenge faced by any color vision system is to contend with the inherent ambiguity of stimulus information, which represents the interaction between multiple attributes of the world (e.g., object reflectance and illumination). How natural systems deal with this problem is not known, although traditional hypotheses are predicated on the idea that vision represents object reflectance accurately by discounting early in processing the conflating effects of illumination. Here, we test the merits of this general supposition by confronting bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) with a color discrimination task that can be solved only if information about the illuminant is not discounted but maintained in processing and thus available to higher-order learned behavior. We show that bees correctly use the intensity and chromaticity of illumination as a contextual cue to guide them to different target colors. In fact, we trained bees to choose opposite, rather than most similar, target colors after an illumination change. This performance cannot be explained with a simple color-constancy mechanism that discounts illumination. Further tests show that bees do not use a simple assessment of the overhead illumination, but that they assess the spectral relationships between a floral target and its background. These results demonstrate that bees can be color-constant without discounting the illuminant; that, in fact, they can use information about the illuminant itself as a salient source of information.

Animals↗

PubMed2004

Visual development: experience puts the colour in life.

Recent findings show that colour processing, like most other sensory attributes, is shaped by experience. While such studies can reveal the mechanisms of development, can they also help uncover the mechanisms of perception?

Color↗

PubMed2004

Fusion and rivalry are dependent on the perceptual meaning of visual stimuli.

We view the world with two eyes and yet are typically only aware of a single, coherent image. Arguably the simplest explanation for this is that the visual system unites the two monocular stimuli into a common stream that eventually leads to a single coherent sensation. However, this notion is inconsistent with the well-known phenomenon of rivalry; when physically different stimuli project to the same retinal location, the ensuing perception alternates between the two monocular views in space and time. Although fundamental for understanding the principles of binocular vision and visual awareness, the mechanisms under-lying binocular rivalry remain controversial. Specifically, there is uncertainty about what determines whether monocular images undergo fusion or rivalry. By taking advantage of the perceptual phenomenon of color contrast, we show that physically identical monocular stimuli tend to rival-not fuse-when they signify different objects at the same location in visual space. Conversely, when physically different monocular stimuli are likely to represent the same object at the same location in space, fusion is more likely to result. The data suggest that what competes for visual awareness in the two eyes is not the physical similarity between images but the similarity in their perceptual/empirical meaning.

Color Perception↗

PubMed2004

Responses of human visual cortex to uniform surfaces.

Surface perception is fundamental to human vision, yet most studies of visual cortex have focused on the processing of borders. We therefore investigated the responses of human visual cortex to parametric changes in the luminance of uniform surfaces by using functional MRI. Early visual areas V1 and V2/V3 showed strong and reliable increases in signal for both increments and decrements in surface luminance. Responses were significantly larger for decrements than for increments, which was fully accounted for by differences in retinal illumination arising from asymmetric pupil dynamics. Responses to both sustained and transient changes of illumination were transient. Signals in early visual cortex scaled linearly with the magnitude of change in retinal illumination, as did subjects' subjective ratings of the perceived brightness of the stimuli. Our findings show that early visual cortex responds strongly to surfaces and that perception of surface brightness is compatible with brain responses at the earliest cortical stages of processing.

Humans↗

PubMed2004

Perceiving the intensity of light.

The relationship between luminance (i.e., the photometric intensity of light) and its perception (i.e., sensations of lightness or brightness) has long been a puzzle. In addition to the mystery of why these perceptual qualities do not scale with luminance in any simple way, "illusions" such as simultaneous brightness contrast, Mach bands, Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet edge effects, and the Chubb-Sperling-Solomon illusion have all generated much interest but no generally accepted explanation. The authors review evidence that the full range of this perceptual phenomenology can be rationalized in terms of an empirical theory of vision. The implication of these observations is that perceptions of lightness and brightness are generated according to the probability distributions of the possible sources of luminance values in stimuli that are inevitably ambiguous.

Attention↗

PubMed2002

A rationale for the structure of color space.

The colors perceived by humans in response to light stimuli are generally described in terms of four color categories (reds, greens, blues and yellows), the members of which are systematically arrayed around gray. This broadly accepted description of color sensation differs fundamentally from the light that induces it, which is neither 'circular' nor categorical. What, then, accounts for these discrepancies between the structure of color experience and the physical reality that underlies it? We suggest that these differences are based on two related requirements for successful color vision: (1) that spectra be ordered according to their physical similarities and differences; and (2) that this ordering be constrained by the four-color map problem.

Animals↗

PubMed2002

The empirical basis of color perception.

Rationalizing the perceptual effects of spectral stimuli has been a major challenge in vision science for at least the last 200 years. Here we review evidence that this otherwise puzzling body of phenomenology is generated by an empirical strategy of perception in which the color an observer sees is entirely determined by the probability distribution of the possible sources of the stimulus. The rationale for this strategy in color vision, as in other visual perceptual domains, is the inherent ambiguity of the real-world origins of any spectral stimulus.

Color Perception↗