1. The role of color and attention-to-color in mirror-symmetry perception
- Author
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Frederick A. A. Kingdom, Aaron Remkes, Hyung-Chul O. Li, Stéphane J.M. Rainville, and Elena Gheorghiu
- Subjects
Physics ,Multidisciplinary ,Visual perception ,business.industry ,media_common.quotation_subject ,05 social sciences ,Article ,050105 experimental psychology ,Combinatorics ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Colored ,Probability summation ,Perception ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Computer vision ,Artificial intelligence ,business ,Mirror symmetry ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,media_common - Abstract
The role of color in the visual perception of mirror-symmetry is controversial. Some reports support the existence of color-selective mirror-symmetry channels, others that mirror-symmetry perception is merely sensitive to color-correlations across the symmetry axis. Here we test between the two ideas. Stimuli consisted of colored Gaussian-blobs arranged either mirror-symmetrically or quasi-randomly. We used four arrangements: (1) ‘segregated’ – symmetric blobs were of one color, random blobs of the other color(s); (2) ‘random-segregated’ – as above but with the symmetric color randomly selected on each trial; (3) ‘non-segregated’ – symmetric blobs were of all colors in equal proportions, as were the random blobs; (4) ‘anti-symmetric’ – symmetric blobs were of opposite-color across the symmetry axis. We found: (a) near-chance levels for the anti-symmetric condition, suggesting that symmetry perception is sensitive to color-correlations across the symmetry axis; (b) similar performance for random-segregated and non-segregated conditions, giving no support to the idea that mirror-symmetry is color selective; (c) highest performance for the color-segregated condition, but only when the observer knew beforehand the symmetry color, suggesting that symmetry detection benefits from color-based attention. We conclude that mirror-symmetry detection mechanisms, while sensitive to color-correlations across the symmetry axis and subject to the benefits of attention-to-color, are not color selective.
- Published
- 2016
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