Uncovering Perceptual Templates with Natural Statistics

In this episode of the Journal of Neurophysiology’s podcast series, coauthor Lorenzo Landolfi joins us to discuss the newly published research titled "Reverse correlation of natural statistics for ecologically relevant characterization of human perceptual templates." Reverse correlation remains a cornerstone technique for probing neuronal and perceptual receptive fields, yet its application to naturalistic behavior is complicated by the complex structure of real-world stimuli. While advances in accounting for natural statistics have shown promise in neuronal studies, their relevance to human perception has remained uncertain—until now. Landolfi explains how these methods can be extended to psychophysical settings, the important caveats researchers must consider, and what the findings reveal about how we interpret our visual world.

Reverse correlation of natural statistics for ecologically relevant characterization of human perceptual templates Lorenzo Landolfi and Peter Neri

Journal of Neurophysiology 2025 133:6, 1717-1739