Orientação de saliência sem córtex visual e seleção de alvo no peixe arqueiro

terça-feira, setembro 14, 2010

Orientation saliency without visual cortex and target selection in archer fish

Alik Mokeichev a,b, Ronen Segev b,c,1, and Ohad Ben-Shahar a,b,1,2

Author Affiliations

aDepartment of Computer Science,
bZlotowski Center for Neuroscience, and
cDepartment of Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel

Edited by Thomas D. Albright, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, and approved August 19, 2010 (received for review April 23, 2010)

↵1R.S. and O.B.-S. contributed equally to this work.

Abstract

Our visual attention is attracted by salient stimuli in our environment and affected by primitive features such as orientation, color, and motion. Perceptual saliency due to orientation contrast has been extensively demonstrated in behavioral experiments with humans and other primates and is believed to be facilitated by the functional organization of the primary visual cortex. In behavioral experiments with the archer fish, a proficient hunter with remarkable visual abilities, we found an orientation saliency effect similar to that observed in human subjects. Given the enormous evolutionary distance between humans and archer fish, our findings suggest that orientation-based saliency constitutes a fundamental building block for efficient visual information processing.
orientation contrast   visual information processing    visual saliency  orientation-based texture segregation   visual search

Footnotes

2To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ben-shahar@cs.bgu.ac.il.

Author contributions: R.S. and O.B.-S. designed research; A.M. performed research; A.M., R.S., and O.B.-S. analyzed data; and A.M., R.S., and O.B.-S. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

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