Abstract
This study investigated how visual systems recover depth-order from orientation-defined junctions. Stimuli were superimposed stripes defined by Gabor micro-patterns (Gabors). In one stripe (random stripe), Gabor orientation was randomly selected from a given range, while in the other (constant stripe) it was selected so as to be different from the mean orientation of the random stripe by 90°. Observers reported which of the two stripes, the right- or left-tilted one, they perceived as “nearer” than the other. Observers frequently reported that the random stripe was nearer than the constant stripe. The results appeared to stem from detection of discontinuity of texture edges of the constant stripe due to masking by the random stripe at junctions. This idea was confirmed in the following experiments where discontinuity of the texture edges at junctions was introduced by changing the Gabor luminance contrast in one stripe but keeping it intact in the other. The results indicated that processing of texture edges at junctions can contribute to the perception of depth-order.
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Notes
Some observers participating in both Experiments 1 and 2 debriefed that the task in the latter experiment was more difficult than that in the former one. We suppose that the high task difficulty in Experiment 2 might cause response bias towards ‘no depth, resulting in the reduced proportion of other two responses even in 100% density condition which was just the same as the 180° in Experiment 1.
In the experiments 1 and 2, 95% confidence interval showed that in most of experimental conditions, proportion of ‘no depth perception’ was not deviated from chance level. This outcome might be because observers tried to make each response in a similar frequency. Hence, it was unlikely that the inducing of a non-depth order choice in the procedure allows collecting more accurate data than a forced choice task. Rather, it was highly likely that the response category ‘no depth was perceived’ worked as a kind of noise in the judgment for our stimuli. On the other hand, the response proportion for other categories changed consistently with experimental manipulations such as distribution ranges (exp. 1) or the density of Gabors at junctions (exp. 2). From this point of view, we employed a two alternative forced-choice task in the experiments 3 and 4, instead of the non-forced choice task.
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Kawabe, T., Miura, K. Recovering depth-order from orientation-defined junctions. Psychological Research 70, 375–383 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-005-0227-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-005-0227-8