Real-world visual texture cloning upon prolonged gaze fixation

It is widely acknowledged that, in order to provide a rich unified experience to our internal conscious observer, the brain constructs a sophisticated model of the world on the basis of fragmented pieces of information incoming from sensory organs. It has been long known that perceptual filling-in mechanisms exist to extrapolate missing information from adjacent visual fields, especially in the periphery. Recently, a uniformity illusion has been reported for primitive features, such as color, shape and motion, in which the content of central vision spreads to the periphery upon prolonged gaze fixation. Here I report that similar illusion exists for real-world textures, such as grass and foliage, observed directly in a real environment or on a photographic image. The texture around the point of gaze fixation is perceptually cloned to cover the areas of similar texture and color. This illusion may be triggered by the fading of textural information in the periphery due to the Troxler effect. This is a preliminary report and requires validation in multiple subjects and detailed characterization.