Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Does spatial invariance result from insensitivity to change?

Frederick A A Kingdom1, David J Field, Adriana Olmos

  • 1McGill Vision Research, Montréal, Québec, Canada. fred.kingdom@mcgill.ca

Journal of Vision
|January 26, 2008
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Clinician awareness, attitudes and prescribing practices relating to doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis (DoxyPEP) in Ireland: Cross-sectional survey of sexual health professionals.

International journal of STD & AIDS·2026
Same author

Awareness, attitudes and early use of doxycycline prophylaxis among gbMSM in Ireland: findings from a 2025 community-based cross-sectional survey.

Sexually transmitted infections·2026
Same author

fMRI measures of interocular luminance masking reflect rapid binocular plasticity.

Vision research·2025
Same author

Detection and identification of monocular, binocular, and dichoptic stimuli are mediated by binocular sum and difference channels.

Journal of vision·2025
Same author

When two eyes are worse than one: Binocular summation for chromatic, interocular-anti-phase stimuli.

Journal of vision·2025
Same author

Exploring the Healthcare Experiences and Preferences of LGBT+ People: An Online Asynchronous Focus Group Study.

Journal of advanced nursing·2025
Same journal

Analysis of human visual experience data.

Journal of vision·2026
Same journal

Pyramid-based Bayesian modeling for high-resolution behavioral analysis.

Journal of vision·2026
Same journal

Sensation without perception: The white whale effect and perceptual blindness in autonomous vehicles.

Journal of vision·2026
Same journal

Gaze behavior during closed-captioned movie viewing adapts to absent audio through more frequent switching between text and scene.

Journal of vision·2026
Same journal

In pursuit of saccade awareness: Limited volitional control and minimal conscious access to catch-up saccades during smooth pursuit eye movements.

Journal of vision·2026
Same journal

Dissociable effects of element-lifetime and stimulus-duration on local and global motion processing: An equivalent noise study.

Journal of vision·2026
See all related articles

The human visual system is less sensitive to common image transformations like changes in position or size than to random noise. This suggests visual processing prioritizes invariance over preserving all details.

Area of Science:

  • Visual Science
  • Computational Neuroscience
  • Image Processing

Background:

  • The visual system achieves invariance (e.g., to position, size) while maintaining selectivity, a fundamental question in visual science.
  • Existing theories differ on whether visual information is maintained or discarded during this process.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how the human visual system detects wide-field changes in natural images.
  • To compare sensitivity to common geometric transformations versus random noise.

Main Methods:

  • Human observers detected various image changes, including affine transforms, intensity variations, and added white noise.
  • Sensitivity was quantified using the Euclidean distance (L(2) norm) between image pairs.
  • Control experiments addressed statistical properties of image differences.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Observers were significantly less sensitive (by an order of magnitude) to geometric transformations than to added noise.
  • This sensitivity difference was not due to statistical properties of the image differences.

Conclusions:

  • The visual system's processes for building invariant representations lead to reduced sensitivity to common natural image transformations.
  • This results in lower sensitivity to transformations frequently encountered in the natural world.