Randomly oriented edge arrangements dominate naturalistic arrangements in binocular rivalry

Biological visual systems are highly adapted to the image statistics of the natural world. A particularly important aspect of the statistics of natural scenes is the arrangements of edges they contain. Here, we examined how different arrangements of edges influence human perceptual saliency using a binocular rivalry paradigm. We constructed fields of randomly positioned Gabor patches with orientation arrangements containing co-oriented, co-circular and naturalistic structure. We rivalled these against arrangements with random orientations, which have higher entropy. Surprisingly, we found that fields with randomly oriented edges consistently dominated over the more ordered arrangements. These results suggest that visual scene entropy may be a key variable in early perceptual saliency.

► We used binocular rivalry to measure the perceptual salience of edge arrangements. ► Random arrangements were tested against co-aligned, co-circular and naturalistic arrangements. ► Randomly arranged edges are more salient than ordered types of edge arrangements. ► Entropy reduction appears to be a key aspect of early perceptual salience.