Abstract
While it is often assumed that objects can be recognized irrespective of where they fall on the retina, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this ability. By exposing human subjects to an altered world where some objects systematically changed identity during the transient blindness that accompanies eye movements, we induced predictable object confusions across retinal positions, effectively 'breaking' position invariance. Thus, position invariance is not a rigid property of vision but is constantly adapting to the statistics of the environment.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank B. Balas, N. Kanwisher and P. Sinha for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this work and J. Deutsch for technical support. This work was supported by the US National Eye Institute (NIH-R01-EY014970) and the Pew Charitable Trusts (PEW UCSF 2893sc). D.D.C. is supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. N.O. was supported by the Paul E. Gray Memorial Undergraduate fund.
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Supplementary Fig. 1
Subjects tended to perform slightly better with object pairs that were never swapped on either side (“control” conditions) than with test object pairs across positions where those objects had behaved normally during the exposure phase (“unswapped” conditions), though this trend was not significant in either experiment. (PDF 49 kb)
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Cox, D., Meier, P., Oertelt, N. et al. 'Breaking' position-invariant object recognition. Nat Neurosci 8, 1145–1147 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1519
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1519
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