Title: Early Salient Region Selection Does Not Drive Rapid Visual Categorization,
Abstract: The current dominant visual processing paradigm in both human and machine
research is the feedforward, layered hierarchy of neural-like processing
elements. Within this paradigm, visual saliency is seen by many to have a
specific role, namely that of early selection. Early selection is thought to
enable very fast visual performance by limiting processing to only the most
relevant candidate portions of an image. Though this strategy has indeed led to
improved processing time efficiency in machine algorithms, at least one set of
critical tests of this idea has never been performed with respect to the role
of early selection in human vision. How would the best of the current saliency
models perform on the stimuli used by experimentalists who first provided
evidence for this visual processing paradigm? Would the algorithms really
provide correct candidate sub-images to enable fast categorization on those
same images? Here, we report on a new series of tests of these questions whose
results suggest that it is quite unlikely that such an early selection process
has any role in human rapid visual categorization.