ArticleeLife2018
The lawful imprecision of human surface tilt estimation in natural scenes.
Article in eLife, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Common Prescription Lens Correction Causes Motion Illusions in the Presbyopic and General Populations.Investigative ophthalmology & visual science · 2026Article
- Monovision-induced motion illusions in presbyopic and non-presbyopic populations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Optimal Estimation of Local Motion-in-Depth with Naturalistic Stimuli.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Validation of the hind feet position score and its association with heel height difference in dairy cows.Veterinary research communications · 2024Article
- Continuous psychophysics shows millisecond-scale visual processing delays are faithfully preserved in movement dynamics.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Shape, perspective, and what is and is not perceived: Comment on Morales, Bax, and Firestone (2020).Psychological review · 2023Article
- A General Framework for Inferring Bayesian Ideal Observer Models from Psychophysical Data.eNeuro · 2023Review
- Perceptual consequences of interocular differences in the duration of temporal integration.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- Stereo slant discrimination of planar 3D surfaces: Frontoparallel versus planar matching.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- Mental geometry of perceiving 3D size in pictures.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Contact lenses, the reverse Pulfrich effect, and anti-Pulfrich monovision corrections.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Mental geometry of three-dimensional size perception.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Natural scene statistics predict how humans pool information across space in surface tilt estimation.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Predicting the Partition of Behavioral Variability in Speed Perception with Naturalistic Stimuli.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Learning to see stuff.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2019Review
- Computational luminance constancy from naturalistic images.Journal of vision · 2018Article
- Picture perception reveals mental geometry of 3D scene inferences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Depth variation and stereo processing tasks in natural scenes.Journal of vision · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Estimating local surface orientation (slant and tilt) is fundamental to recovering the three-dimensional structure of the environment. It is unknown how well humans perform this task in natural scenes. Here, with a database of natural stereo-images having groundtruth surface orientation at each pixel, we find dramatic differences in human tilt estimation with natural and artificial stimuli. Estimates are precise and unbiased with artificial stimuli and imprecise and strongly biased with natural stimuli. An image-computable Bayes optimal model grounded in natural scene statistics predicts human bias, precision, and trial-by-trial errors without fitting parameters to the human data. The similarities between human and model performance suggest that the complex human performance patterns with natural stimuli are lawful, and that human visual systems have internalized local image and scene statistics to optimally infer the three-dimensional structure of the environment. These results generalize our understanding of vision from the lab to the real world.
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