The Processing Levels Of Visual Perception In Figure Recognition

Perception is the comprehensive and synthesized reflection of the brain on environmental objects. The formation of perception has its roots in the bottom-up coding and transmission of isolated sensory information, and is also subject to the top-down direction of an individual's knowledge and experience. Neuroscience research on the visual nervous system has established the physical frame of perception, contributing to visual perception process theory. But there is still a lack of systematic and quantitative experimental research on the relationship of the stages of such visual information processing, and the function of attention in visual perception.This paper intends to give quantitative results about the stages of information processing in visual perception by combining factors acting on different processing stages, such as brightness and visual angle on low-level vision, and 3D orientation and dot locus on high-level vision in different figure recognition tasks, including global and local visual tasks, independent judgment and relative comparison, as well as collection of data about reaction time and eye movement.Conclusions:1. Visual perception contains low-level and high-level stages, which have both independent and systematic aspects.2. Perceptual-level processing is more closely tied to total fixation counts, while low-level processing is more linked to the duration of visual fixation.3. The allocation of attention resource influences fixation duration, with more attention allocation resulting in longer fixation duration. But under conditions of data-limited process the effect is reversed.4. There are gender differences in visual perception. Males are more sensitive to the amount of information at the perceptual level and more likely to form global perception than are females. Females are better at observing and recognizing finer features than are males.5. Whether or not there is an assigned perception task influences the manner of observation. In passive observation, subjects tend to maintain a certain level of arousal by fixating more on easier stimuli. But when doing specific tasks, subjects fixate more on difficult stimuli.6. Visual system is sensitive to changing stimuli.In independent judgement, the change of target feature lessens the need on attention resource while irrelevant disturbance increases the allocation of attention resource. The effects of target change and irrelevant change are independent. In relative comparison, target change and irrelevant change influence attentional need interactively:the change of target feature results in more allocation of attention resource during disturbance.7. Global processing is involuntary and automatic while the processing of local feature is not automatic. Global perception influences the recognition of local features but there is no opposite effect.8. Fixed eye movement pattern can be stored and modulate the following fixation to have the same duration in free observation.