About individual differences in vision

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIn cognition, audition, and somatosensation, performance strongly correlates between different paradigms, which suggests the existence of common factors. In contrast, visual performance in seemingly very similar tasks, such as visual and bisection acuity, are hardly related, i.e., pairwise correlations between performance levels are low even though test-retest reliability is high. Here we show similar results for visual illusions. Consistent with previous findings, we found significant correlations between the illusion magnitude of the Ebbinghaus and Ponzo illusions, but this relationship was the only significant correlation out of 15 further comparisons. Similarly, we found a significant link for the Ponzo illusion with both mental imagery and cognitive disorganization. However, most other correlations between illusions and personality were not significant. The findings suggest that vision is highly specific, i.e., there is no common factor. While this proposal does not exclude strong and stable associations between certain illusions and between certain illusions and personality traits, these associations seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

A decision-time account of individual variability in context-dependent orientation estimation

“…A similar, though non-significant correlation was found between the TI and the fixation TAE effect 490 magnitudes (five shared observers, R 2 = 0.45, p = 0.21, t(3) = 1.58). This correlation is consistent with the idea of a common factor for similar visual phenomena (Grzeczkowski et al, 2017). Here, the common factor seems to be explained by RT, though a general account may also require other factors (such as JND, see the Discussion).…”

“…Overall, we found that individuals with a different bias can be explained by having different RTs but the (Grzeczkowski et al, 2017;Pellicano & Burr, 2012;Tibber et al, 2013;Yang et al, 2013).…”

“…Fig. 7 -Co-variation (Grzeczkowski et al, 2017;Song et al, 2013). The results also showed a large variation in RT between individuals, where RT ranged from ~500 ms to ~1800 ms when the target was vertical (Fig.…”

“…Possible benefits include (a) self-calibration, constancy, or correction of a reference "norm" (Andrews, 1964;Day, 1972;Dekel & Sagi, 2019a;Gibson & Radner, 1937;Webster, 2011), (b) optimization of the neural code, such as improved gain of computational units, improved coding sensitivity to likely events, or decorrelation to remove coding redundancies (Benucci, Saleem, & & Webster, 2017). In the TI, as well as in other spatial-context-dependent biases, individuals measure large differences (by an order of magnitude), with strong test-retest reliability (Grzeczkowski et al, 2017;Song, Schwarzkopf, & Rees, 2013). These differences were found to be correlated with variability in orientation JND (just-noticeable-differences, showing an R 2 value of ~60%) and were thought to reflect variability in the size of area V1 across individuals (Schwarzkopf, Song, & Rees, 2011;Song et 70 al., 2013).…”

Stable individual signatures in object localization

“…Perceptual processes in human observers vary considerably across a number of domains, producing idiosyncratic biases in the appearance of ambiguous figures [1], faces [2], and a number of visual illusions [3–6]. This work has largely emphasized object and pattern recognition, which suggests that these are more likely to produce individual differences.…”