The primate visual system has long been known to utilize such perceptual regularities (DiCarlo & Cox, 2007 Wagemans, Elder et al., 2012 Wagemans, Feldman et al., 2012). In particular, stimuli that are more likely to occur should be encoded more compactly. It is natural to expect that efficient representations would be maximally informative with respect to the actual inputs in the world. Our results suggest that regularity plays an important role in stimulus encoding in the ventral visual processing stream. Finally, we found that the results of these experiments could not be accounted for by low-level stimulus properties and are distinct from norm-based encoding. In the second experiment, using multivoxel pattern analysis, we further show that regularity is encoded in terms of the fMRI signal strength but not in the distributed pattern of responses.

We found that the response strength in the shape-selective lateral occipital area was consistently lower for a higher degree of regularity in the stimuli. Configural regularity ranged from a generic configuration to stimuli resembling an “L” (i.e., a right-angle L-junction), a “T” (i.e., a right-angle midpoint T-junction), or a “+”,-the latter being the most regular stimulus.

To explore the underlying encoding strategies during visual information processing, we presented participants with two-line configurations that varied in the amount of configural regularity (or degrees of freedom in the relative positioning of the two lines) in a fMRI experiment. Abstract The visual system is very efficient in encoding stimulus properties by utilizing available regularities in the inputs.

What is visual encoding in psychology