The mechanism of mental scanning in foveal vision

In order to perceive a visual pattern which includes several elemental pictures, the perceiver must allot his cognitive resources to suitably selected parts of the pattern and scan them in sequence. Even when the visual field is small and eye-movement is not required, such scanning is found. We called it mental scanning and performed psychological experiments to investigate the mechanism. The tasks were to discern whether the elemental pictures in a pattern are all the same (SP) or not (DP). The per cents correct of the task were measured for various exposure durations. We defined the threshold as the exposure duration at which 75% correct answers were obtained. Our main findings are as follows. The threshold for SP is proportional to the number of picture elements, while the threshold for DP is constant. It appears that two modes of mental scanning exist. One is serial processing for SP, and the other is parallel processing for DP. We proposed a two-layered neural network model having the following characteristics. 1) Information is transmitted as two types of signals through two separate channels; one is the transient signals to the Y layer and the other is the sustained signals slowly conducted to the X layer. 2) Interactions among neurons in the Y layer are lateral inhibitory, while those in the X layer are self-excitatory and lateralinhibitory. 3) Every neuron in the Y layer sends inhibitory signals to every neuron in the X layer except one with the same receptive field. Under these conditions, the dynamics of neurons in the X layer is represented by a set of certain equations. From phase plane analysis and numerical integration, the model appears to have an ability to account for various experimental results.