Summary
A theoretical and empirical investigation was undertaken to investigate the role of surface texture in ecological optics. Forty-nine subjects each viewed a set of 30 professionally produced photographs of rectangular samples of surface textures. The photographs included common textures such as sand, fur, rock, and so forth. These photographs were flat and, therefore, these static surfaces provide only a fraction of the information afforded by normal textures. Subjects answered questions about the identity, physical properties, and viewing conditions of each texture. Correct identifications were made in about two-thirds of the cases. When no identification, or an incorrect one, was given, subjects were still able to identify physical state (solid, liquid, gas), planarity (planar, rough), and pigmentation (homogeneous, uneven) at a better than chance level, though hardness could not be accurately assessed. Diffuseness versus directionality of incident light could be distinguished, though mistakes were more frequent on this discrimination. The direction of incident light, in cases where it was sharply defined, could be determined accurately for only a few cases of rough textures; in some others, light was reported as incident from either the correct side or its 180° opposite — a “polarization effect”. Most subjects correctly detected the orientation of textures photographed in the frontal plane, but only a few textures' slants were accurately perceived. The results are interpreted in terms of properties of substances as specified by invariants of the optic way.
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The empirical work described here was done at Cornell University in 1967, and a draft manuscript was written by the two authors. At that time the second author moved to Stanford University, and the manuscript was forgotten. It was found when the second author moved to the University of Bielefeld, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, in 1984–1985. The paper was revised and presented at the Conference on Event Perception in Uppsala, Sweden, in July 1985, with the kind permission and assistance of Prof. E. J. Gibson. The second author thanks E. J. Gibson and T. Stoffregen for reviews and suggestions based on an earlier draft of the manuscript
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Gibson, J.J., Bridgeman, B. The visual perception of surface texture in photographs. Psychol. Res 49, 1–5 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00309196
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00309196