The Representation of Simple Ensemble Visual Features Outside the Focus of Attention
By George A. Alvarez, Aude Oliva. Psychology Science, 2008
367 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The representation of visual information inside the focus of attention is more precise than the representation of information outside the focus of attention. We found that the visual system can compensate for the cost of withdrawing attention by pooling noisy local features and computing summary statistics. The location of an individual object is a local feature, whereas the center of mass of several objects (centroid) is a summary feature representing the mean object location. Three experiments showed that withdrawing attention degraded the representation of individual positions more than the representation of the centroid. It appears that information outside the focus of attention can be represented at an abstract level that lacks local detail, but nevertheless carries a precise statistical summary of the scene. The term ensemble features refers to a broad class of statistical summary features that we propose collectively make up the representation of information outside the focus of attention.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15c01b23685868d5b0011b2732a42ca91ebdc63c
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Citations in the corpus
- Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory (2010, background): “One benefit of ensemble representations is that they can be highly accurate, even when the local measurements constituting them are very noisy (Alvarez & Oliva, 2008, 2009).”
- Recognition of natural scenes from global properties: Seeing the forest without representing the trees (2008, neutral): “…2003] and [Chong and Treisman, 2005]), as is the average orientation of peripheral elements (Parkes, Lund, Angelucci, Solomon, & Morgan, 2001); some contrast texture descriptors (Chubb, Nam, Bindman, & Sperling, 2007) as well as the center of mass of a group of objects (Alvarez & Oliva, 2008).”