Spatial ensemble statistics are efficient codes that can be represented with reduced attention

• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0808981106
• Publication Date: 2009-04-21T08:11:14Z
• Authors: George A. Alvarez; Aude Oliva
• Keywords: Pooling; Neural coding

There is a great deal of structural regularity in the natural environment, and such regularities confer an opportunity to form compressed, efficient representations. Although this concept has been extensively studied within domain low-level sensory coding, there limited focus on coding field visual attention. Here we show that spatial patterns orientation information ("spatial ensemble statistics") can be efficiently encoded under conditions reduced In our task, observers monitored for changes pattern background elements while they were attentively tracking moving objects foreground. By using stimuli enable us dissociate local structure from structure, found more sensitive altered than did not alter structure. We propose reducing attention increases amount noise feature representations, but statistics capitalize overcome by pooling across measurements, gaining precision representation ensemble.