Texture sensitivity

Surface texture can often be estimated from visual cues involving the spatial distribution of contrast; smooth textures have more uniform contrast distribution than bumpy textures. While humans rely on the high-acuity fovea to make such discriminations, most species respond to texture cues without a fovea. This chapter explores the capacity of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) to transmit information about space that is up to an order of magnitude finer in scale than the size of their receptive field centers. The key to this computation is that most RGCs integrate space nonlinearly.