PubMed · 5498186
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N C Smith. 1970. Peripheral recognition thresholds for digits.. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1970.31.3.732
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The mechanisms underlying the parsing of a spatial distribution of velocity vectors into two adjacent (spatially segregated) or overlapping (transparent) motion surfaces were examined using random dot kinematograms. Parsing might occur using either of two principles. Surfaces might be defined on the basis of similarity of motion vectors and then sharp perceptual boundaries drawn between different surfaces (continuity-based segmentation). Alternatively, detection of a high gradient of direction or speed separating the motion surfaces might drive the process (discontinuity-based segmentation). To establish which method is used, we examined the effect of blurring the motion direction gradient. In the case of a sharp direction gradient, each dot had one of two directions differing by 135 degrees. With a shallow gradient, most dots had one of two directions but the directions of the remainder spanned the range between one motion-defined surface and the other. In the spatial segregation case the gradient defined a central boundary separating two regions. In the transparent version the dots were randomly positioned. In both cases all dots moved with the same speed and existed for only two frames before being randomly replaced. The ability of observers to parse the motion distribution was measured in terms of their ability to discriminate the direction of one of the two surfaces. Performance was hardly affected by spreading the gradient over at least 25% of the dots (corresponding to a 1 degrees strip in the segregation case). We conclude that detection of sharp velocity gradients is not necessary for distinguishing different motion surfaces.
The perceived direction of different barber-pole stimuli was assessed by adjusting an arrow on the screen. The terminator ratio (TR: number of terminators moving along the long side divided by the number of terminators moving along the small side) was either one or three. In this latter case, the aperture orientation was either vertical or horizontal. The grating was either in the same plane as the aperture (intrinsic condition) or behind the aperture--the frame containing the aperture had a crossed disparity relative to the grating--(extrinsic condition). A nested design with 120 observers was used for the whole study. Five grating orientations were intermingled within any session. With a terminator ratio of three, the results depend strongly on the aperture's orientation. When the rectangular aperture is horizontal, the perceived direction of an intrinsic grating is horizontal (the typical barber-pole illusion), whereas it is only slightly biased towards orthogonal one-dimensional (1D) motion signals (Vp) in the extrinsic condition. When the aperture is vertical, the perceived direction in the intrinsic condition is largely biased toward Vp, and on average it is close to Vp in the extrinsic condition. In this latter case, however, analysing the distributions of responses shows that many responses do not lie around Vp but are clustered near vertical or horizontal. This motion capture depends on the grating's orientation. With a terminator ratio of one, motion capture is present in both the extrinsic and intrinsic conditions. Moreover, a global bias toward horizontal is observed: this horizontal bias is much larger in the extrinsic condition. Altogether, these results suggest that binocular disparity alone is a weak determinant of the extrinsic/intrinsic classification of two-dimensional (2D) motion signals compared to the occlusion cues provided by unpaired regions in binocular images. Second, truly extrinsic 2D motion signals are not suppressed but rather actively compete against each other to capture the 1D motion signals. This results in a perceptual multistability which is much stronger with extrinsic signals. Finally, given the inherent multistability of barber-pole stimuli, high-level factors can alter the strength of this competition and prime any of the 2D motion signals.
Contour integration was measured in the normal peripheral field to determine if an explanation based solely on the known peripheral positional uncertainty was sufficient to explain performance. The task involved the detection of paths composed of micropatterns with correlated carrier orientations embedded in a field of similar micropatterns of random position and orientation (Field, D. J., Hayes A., & Hess, R. F. (1993). Vision Research, 33, 173-193). The intrinsic positional uncertainty for each eccentric locus was measured with the same stimulus and it did not account for levels of peripheral performance. We show that peripheral performance on this task does not get worse with eccentricity beyond about 10 degrees and that these results can be modeled by simple filtering without any subsequent cellular linking interactions.