Title
Document Type
Article
Date
1998
Keywords
visual stimulus, vision science, visual sensitivity, noise, factoring sensitivity
Language
English
Disciplines
Psychology
Description/Abstract
Measuring the dependence of visual sensitivity on parameters of the visual stimulus is a mainstay of vision science. However, it is not widely appreciated that visual sensitivity is a product of two factors that are each invariant with respect to many properties of the stimulus and task. By estimating these two factors, one can isolate visual processes more easily than by using sensitivity measures alone. The underlying idea is that noise limits all forms of communication, including vision. As an empirical matter, it is often useful to measure the human observer’s threshold with and without a noise background added to the display, to disentangle the observer’s ability from the observer’s intrinsic noise. And when we know how much noise there is, it is often useful to calculate ideal performance of the task at hand, as a benchmark for human performance. This strips away the intrinsic difficulty of the task to reveal a pure measure of human ability. Here we show how to do the factoring of sensitivity into efficiency and equivalent noise, and we document the invariances of the two factors.
Recommended Citation
Pelli, Denis G. and Farell, Bart, "Why Use Noise?" (1998). Biomedical and Chemical Engineering - All Scholarship. 1.
https://surface.syr.edu/bce/1
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Additional Information
Vol. 16, No. 3/March 1999/J. Opt. Soc. Am. A