Abstract
Humans and animals rely on accurate object size perception to guide behavior. Object size is judged from visual input, but the relationship between an object's retinal size and its real-world size varies with distance. Humans perceive object sizes to be relatively constant when retinal size changes. Such size constancy compensates for the variable relationship between retinal size and real-world size, using the context of recent retinal sizes of the same object to bias perception towards its likely real-world size. We therefore hypothesized that object size perception may be affected by the range of recently viewed object sizes, attracting perceived object sizes towards recently viewed sizes. We demonstrate two systematic biases: a central tendency attracting perceived size towards the average size across all trials, and a serial dependence attracting perceived size towards the size presented on the previous trial. We recently described topographic object size maps in the human parietal cortex. We therefore hypothesized that neural representations of object size here would be attracted towards recently viewed sizes. We used ultra-high-field (7T) functional MRI and population receptive field modeling to compare object size representations measured with small (0.05–1.4°diameter) and large objects sizes (0.1–2.8°). We found that parietal object size preferences and tuning widths follow this presented range, but change less than presented object sizes. Therefore, perception and neural representation of object size are attracted towards recently viewed sizes. This context-dependent object size representation reveals effects on neural response preferences that may underlie context dependence of object size perception.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 117909 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-11 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | NeuroImage |
Volume | 232 |
Early online date | 27 Feb 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 15 May 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research grants #452.17.012 to BH, #016.Vici.185.050 to SD, by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology Investgador grant #IF/01405/2014 to BH and Programa COMPETE grant #PTDC/MHC-PCN/0522/2014 to JA and SK, by Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Ammodo award to SD and by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (UK) grant #BB/S006605/1 to AF, and by an European Research Council Starting Grant (#802553, ?ContentMAP?) to JA.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Funding
This work was supported by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research grants #452.17.012 to BH, #016.Vici.185.050 to SD, by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology Investgador grant #IF/01405/2014 to BH and Programa COMPETE grant #PTDC/MHC-PCN/0522/2014 to JA and SK, by Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Ammodo award to SD and by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (UK) grant #BB/S006605/1 to AF, and by an European Research Council Starting Grant (#802553, ?ContentMAP?) to JA.
Funders | Funder number |
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Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology Investgador | /01405/2014 |
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Ammodo | |
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | 802553 |
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council | #BB/S006605/1 |
European Research Council | |
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek | 452.17.012 |
Programa Operacional Temático Factores de Competitividade | /MHC-PCN/0522/2014 |
Keywords
- Functional MRI
- Object size
- Serial dependence
- Size constancy