spatially pooled contrast responses predict neural and perceptual similarity of naturalistic image categories空间汇集对比反应预测神经和知觉相似性的自然图像分类.pdfVIP

Spatially Pooled Contrast Responses Predict Neural and Perceptual Similarity of Naturalistic Image Categories 1 1,2 1 1 Iris I. A. Groen *, Sennay Ghebreab , Victor A. F. Lamme , H. Steven Scholte 1 Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2 Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam, Institute of Informatics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Abstract The visual world is complex and continuously changing. Yet, our brain transforms patterns of light falling on our retina into a coherent percept within a few hundred milliseconds. Possibly, low-level neural responses already carry substantial information to facilitate rapid characterization of the visual input. Here, we computationally estimated low-level contrast responses to computer-generated naturalistic images, and tested whether spatial pooling of these responses could predict image similarity at the neural and behavioral level. Using EEG, we show that statistics derived from pooled responses explain a large amount of variance between single-image evoked potentials (ERPs) in individual subjects. Dissimilarity analysis on multi-electrode ERPs demonstrated that large differences between images in pooled response statistics are predictive of more dissimilar patterns of evoked activity, whereas images with little difference in statistics give rise to highly similar evoked activity patterns. In a separate behavioral experiment, images with large differences in statistics were judged as different categories, whereas images with little differences were confused. These findings suggest that statistics derived from low-level contrast responses can be extracted in e