On the role of spatial phase and phase correlation in vision, illusion, and cognition

Numerous findings indicate that spatial phase bears an important cognitive information. Distortion of phase affects topology of edge structures and makes images unrecognizable. In turn, appropriately phase-structured patterns give rise to various illusions of virtual image content and apparent motio...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gladilin, Evgeny (Author) , Eils, Roland (Author)
Format: Article (Journal)
Language:English
Published: 21 April 2015
In: Frontiers in computational neuroscience
Year: 2015, Volume: 9
ISSN:1662-5188
DOI:10.3389/fncom.2015.00045
Online Access:Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2015.00045
Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2015.00045/full
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Author Notes:Evgeny Gladilin and Roland Eils
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Summary:Numerous findings indicate that spatial phase bears an important cognitive information. Distortion of phase affects topology of edge structures and makes images unrecognizable. In turn, appropriately phase-structured patterns give rise to various illusions of virtual image content and apparent motion. Despite a large body of phenomenological evidence not much is known yet about the role of phase information in neural mechanisms of visual perception and cognition. Here, we are concerned with analysis of the role of spatial phase in computational and biological vision, emergence of visual illusions and pattern recognition. We hypothesize that fundamental importance of phase information for invariant retrieval of structural image features and motion detection promoted development of phase-based mechanisms of neural image processing in course of evolution of biological vision. Using an extension of Fourier phase correlation technique, we show that the core functions of visual system such as motion detection and pattern recognition can be facilitated by the same basic mechanism. Our analysis suggests that emergence of visual illusions can be attributed to presence of coherently phase-shifted repetitive patterns as well as the effects of acuity compensation by saccadic eye movements. We speculate that biological vision relies on perceptual mechanisms effectively similar to phase correlation, and predict neural features of visual pattern (dis)similarity that can be used for experimental validation of our hypothesis of 'cognition by phase correlation'.
Item Description:Gesehen am 08.07.2020
Physical Description:Online Resource
ISSN:1662-5188
DOI:10.3389/fncom.2015.00045