Global Properties of Natural Scenes Shape Local Properties of Human Edge Detectors

Visual cortex analyzes images by first extracting relevant details (eg, edges) via a large array of specialized detectors. The resulting edge map is then relayed to a processing pipeline, the final goal of which is to attribute meaning to the scene. As this process unfolds, does the global interpretation of the image affect how local feature detectors operate? The results show that some aspects of local processing were significantly affected by scene manipulations that were specifically probing the higher-level semantic interpretation of the scene. It may therefore be inaccurate to regard early feature detectors as operating completely outside the domain of higher-level vision