Shift-Invariance of Pattern Recognition in the Visual Field?

The classification behaviour of human observers with respect to compound Gabor signals was tested at foveal and extrafoveal retinal positions. Classification performance was analysed in terms of a probabilistic classification model recently proposed by Rentschler, Jüttner, and Caelli (1994 Vision Research34 669 – 687). The analysis allows inferences about structure and dimensionality of the individual internal representations underlying the classification task and their temporal evolution during the learning process. With this technique it was found that the internal representations of direct and eccentric viewing are intrinsically incommensurable in the sense that extrafoveal pattern representations are characterised by a lower perceptual dimension in feature space relative to the corresponding physical input signals, whereas foveal representations are not (Jüttner and Rentschler, 1996 Vision Research in press). We then addressed the question to what extent observers are capable of generalising class concepts that have been acquired at one particular retinal location to other retinal sites. We found partial generalisation with respect to spatial translation across the visual field. Moreover, there is, in the case of extrafoveal learning, a distinct asymmetry in performance with respect to the visual hemifield in which the signals were originally learned. The latter finding can be related to functional hemispheric specialisation in pattern learning and recognition.