Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The environment that humans live in is complex, yet our brains must perform visual tasks within a few hundred milliseconds in order for us to survive. How we do this is a fundamental question in psychology. Recent research has shown that our environment has shaped the design of our perceptual systems through evolution and experience. Therefore, direct measurement of the statistical regularities in natural environments (scenes) has great potential value for advancing our understanding of visual perception. My past research has examined the relationships between image statistics, such as colour, brightness and texture within natural scenes. As useful as this research is, it has to be noted that many factors determine what parts of an image we actually choose to look at. Consequently, we can distinguish between the set of all possible statistics, and the set of image statistics that will fall on human retina. My research will investigate human eye movements to isolate the parts of images that are commonly viewed by humans. These parts will then be analyzed using computational models of the brain to determine how (and if) the relationships between colour, luminance and texture statistics are represented within the visual system. I will investigate how the relationships between these image statistics might be used to signal important image structures, such as edges and shapes that are precursors for more complex tasks, such as object and scene recognition. I will also investigate if our visual system is sensitive to variations in scene statistics using psychophysical experiments, and if such variations have negative consequences for performance in visual tasks such as scene recognition. The findings of my research will advance our understanding of how the human visual perception uses the structures and relationships found in natural images, in order to perform everyday vision tasks.