The Role of Terminators In Preattentive Perception of Line Textures

Recently, random-dot textures were found that in spite of their identical second-order statistics (hence power spectra) could still be effortlessly discriminated, based on conspicuous local features which include quasi-collinearity, corner, closure, and connectivity. Here, it will be shown, using textures composed of line segments, that these local features are not independent of each other, but can be described by two elementary units: line segments and their terminators. Furthermore, the preattentive texture perception system can count the number of terminators but ignores their positions. The line segments are a special case of bars, which were identically stimulated in these experiments. Besides color, these bars (of given orientation, width and length), their terminators (and crossed bars, as special case of terminators) are the elements of preattentive vision, to be called textons. In preattentive texture discrimination only the first-order statistics of these textons has perceptual significance, while the relative positions between the textons are unnoticed.

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