PSY Seminar: Bilge Sayim

Knowing is not seeing: Redundancy masking and the limits of peripheral vision by Bilge Sayim

To perceive and navigate in complex environments, humans rely strongly on information from the visual periphery. A severe limit of peripheral vision is crowding – the inability to identify objects in clutter that are easily identified in isolation. For example, a letter presented in the periphery that can be identified when presented alone, is often indiscernible when flanked by close-by letters. Crowding does not only deteriorate performance but also changes target appearance. However, only few studies have addressed the appearance of crowded stimuli, even though the specific kinds of appearance changes due to crowding may be key to understanding it. Here, we will present results that show how appearance predicts performance, introduce appearance-based methods that reveal error characteristics of crowding that are not revealed in standard crowding paradigms, and show how factors such as prior knowledge may limit the scope of what we experience in peripheral vision. Finally, we will introduce a newly discovered phenomenon – redundancy masking – that shows how information from repeating patterns does not reach conscious awareness, and suggest that redundancy masking helps to close the gap between object and texture perception.

Classroom: FASS G062

Join Zoom Meeting: https://sabanciuniv.zoom.us/j/93029840612

Meeting ID: 930 2984 0612