Element-arrangement textures in multiple objective tasks

In his long years of studying visual perception, Jacob Beck made many contributions. This article is a short review of one line of his research—that we shared in—and then a presentation of some results from on-going research down the same line. In the 1980s Beck and his colleagues introduced a new kind of visual stimulus: element-arrangement texture patterns. A series of studies with these patterns has shown that a model containing spatial-frequency and orientation-selective channels can explain many aspects of texture perception as long as two kinds of nonlinear processes are also included; the published studies are briefly summarized. The new results come from multiple objective tasks requiring the observer to make simple discriminations between second-order elementarrangement textures. Results with the objective tasks replicate previously published results using subjective ratings, and the use of the objective tasks allows us to explore several more fine-grained questions about complex (second-order) channels and normalization.