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Behavior and neural basis of near-optimal visual search

Nature Neuroscience volume 14, pages 783–790 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

The ability to search efficiently for a target in a cluttered environment is one of the most remarkable functions of the nervous system. This task is difficult under natural circumstances, as the reliability of sensory information can vary greatly across space and time and is typically a priori unknown to the observer. In contrast, visual-search experiments commonly use stimuli of equal and known reliability. In a target detection task, we randomly assigned high or low reliability to each item on a trial-by-trial basis. An optimal observer would weight the observations by their trial-to-trial reliability and combine them using a specific nonlinear integration rule. We found that humans were near-optimal, regardless of whether distractors were homogeneous or heterogeneous and whether reliability was manipulated through contrast or shape. We present a neural-network implementation of near-optimal visual search based on probabilistic population coding. The network matched human performance.

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Figure 1: Reliability and inference in visual search.
Figure 2: Optimal search under unequal reliabilities.
Figure 3: Experimental procedure.
Figure 4: Model predictions for individual-subject receiver operating characteristics.
Figure 5: Model predictions for area under the ROC curve (AUC) in the mixed-reliability condition.
Figure 6: Log likelihood of nonoptimal models relative to the optimal model for individual subjects.
Figure 7: Neural implementation of near-optimal visual search.
Figure 8: Neural network reproduces human search performance.

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Acknowledgements

W.J.M. is supported by award R01EY020958 from the National Eye Institute. V.N. is supported by National Science Foundation grant #0820582. J.M.B. is supported by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and R.v.d.B. by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). A.P. is supported by Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant N00014-07-1-0937, National Institute on Drug Abuse grant #BCS0346785, a research grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation and award P30EY001319 from the National Eye Institute.

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Author notes

  1. Vidhya Navalpakkam

    Present address: Present address: Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, California, USA.,

  2. Wei Ji Ma, Vidhya Navalpakkam, Jeffrey M Beck and Ronald van den Berg: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA

    Wei Ji Ma & Ronald van den Berg

  2. Department of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA

    Vidhya Navalpakkam

  3. Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, London, UK

    Jeffrey M Beck

  4. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA

    Alexandre Pouget

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  1. Wei Ji Ma
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  5. Alexandre Pouget
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Contributions

W.J.M., V.N. and R.v.d.B. designed the experiments. V.N. and R.v.d.B. collected the data. W.J.M., V.N. and R.v.d.B. analyzed the data. W.J.M., J.B. and A.P. developed the theory. J.B. performed the network simulations. W.J.M. and A.P. wrote the manuscript. V.N., J.B. and R.v.d.B. contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Wei Ji Ma.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Figures 1–16, Supplementary Tables 1 and 2, and Supplementary Results (PDF 3590 kb)

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Ma, W., Navalpakkam, V., Beck, J. et al. Behavior and neural basis of near-optimal visual search. Nat Neurosci 14, 783–790 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2814

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