Texture segmentation along the horizontal meridian: nonmonotonic changes in performance with eccentricity.

Abstract

In 3 experiments, subjects were required to detect the presence of a small region of disparate texture embedded in a larger background at a range of eccentricities. Detection performance always peaked several degrees from fixation. Experiment 1 showed that the location of the peak was not retinally specific; scaling the display changed the location of the performance peak. Experiment 2 showed that poor foveal performance could not be explained by cross-frequency interference; filtering out high spatial frequencies did not lead to improved foveal performance. Experiment 3 showed that the effect is not unique to textures comprising left and right oblique line segments. A parsimonious account of these data is that, at the fovea, there is a mismatch between the scale of the texture and the scale of the mechanisms responsible for encoding texture differences. This mismatch diminishes as the textures are moved further into the periphery.