Detection of simple radially symmetric targets: further evidence for the matched filter processing scheme in human...

The detection of small radially symmetric targets was studied using a subthreshold summation paradigm. Small disc and disc-like patterns with diameters up to 0.60 were used for superposition on Bessel functions of zero order, subthreshold contrast and various spatial frequencies. Contrast interrelation functions prove linear over the whole range of contrasts used for the Bessel functions while their slopes show systematic variation with spatial frequency. An extrapolation of sensitivity from the slopes reveals that sensitivity can be predicted by a simple model assuming detection to be mediated by a transfer function made up as a cascade of an even bandpass function and the disc pattern spectrum, as has been found previously using one dimensional luminance distributions. Problems concerning the formation of pattern-specific radial symmetric filters are discussed.