Spatial statistics of natural images can be divided into three categories, each following different distributions as determined by statistical algorithms (Geusebroek and Smeulders, 2003 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision volume 1, p. 130). Two of these classes (random and regular) are associated with local texture perception. We hypothesized that regular textures draw attention and wondered whether this classification can predict bottom - up saccade behaviour. While we tracked their gaze, subjects (N=5) made saccades to circularly arranged arrays of 8 textures (one of them classified as regular, the other random; textures were from the
Columbia-Utrecht texture database.). In a total 3877 trials, 851 saccades went to the location with the regular texture, whereas each of the other 7 locations received on average 432 saccades. This indicates that the presence of a texture classified as regular nearly doubled the chance of subjects directing their gaze to that particular position. While these results provide no proof that humans classify the world into regular and random, they suggest that the brain may compute something analogous to this statistic to determine regions of interest.
@Article{MarsmanPerception2007,
author = "Marsman, J. B. C. and Yanulevskaya, V. and Cornelissen, F. and Geusebroek, J. M.",
title = "Spatial Statistics of Natural Images Predict Gaze Direction",
journal = "Perception",
number = "supplement",
volume = "36",
pages = "35--36",
year = "2007",
url = "https://ivi.fnwi.uva.nl/isis/publications/2007/MarsmanPerception2007"
}