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.
This article contains supporting information online at
+++++
PDF gratuito deste artigo aqui.
+++++
Alik Mokeichev a,b, Ronen Segev b,c,1, and Ohad Ben-Shahar a,b,1,2
Author Affiliations
aDepartment of Computer Science,
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.
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.
This article contains supporting information online at