Illusory size determines the perception of ambiguous apparent motion
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Illusory size determines the perception of ambiguous apparent motion Madeleine Y. Stepper 1 & Cathleen M. Moore 2 & Bettina Rolke 1 & Elisabeth Hein 1
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The visual system constructs perceptions based on ambiguous information. For motion perception, the correspondence problem arises, i.e., the question of which object went where. We asked at which level of processing correspondence is solved – lower levels based on information that is directly available in the retinal input or higher levels based on information that has been abstracted beyond the input directly available at the retina? We used a Ponzo-like illusion to manipulate the perceived size and separations of elements in an ambiguous apparent motion display. Specifically, we presented Ternus displays – for which the type of motion that is perceived depends on how correspondence is resolved – at apparently different distances from the viewer using pictorial depth cues. We found that the perception of motion depended on the apparent depth of the displays, indicating that correspondence processes utilize information that is produced at higher-level processes. Keywords Visual perception . Apparent motion . Object correspondence . Ponzo illusion
Introduction “It’s an illusion” is how we could describe our perception of the three-dimensional world around us. This is because our perception is a constructed representation that is created by our visual system on the basis of ambiguous input information. The information that our visual system receives at the retina is a two-dimensional projection of the threedimensional environment, which means that it is underdetermined and ambiguous. That our visual system actively resolves this ambiguity is evident in bi-stable perceptions such as our experience of the Necker cube (Necker, 1832; Fig. 1a), which can be perceived as oriented in two different ways, despite no change in retinal input, and in illusions like the Ponzo-like size illusion (sometimes also known Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01786-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Madeleine Y. Stepper [email protected] 1
Evolutionary Cognition - Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Schleichstrasse 4, D 72076 Tübingen, Germany
2
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
as the corridor illusion, Fig. 1b), in which identically sized stimuli are perceived as different sized objects because they are perceived as being at different distances from the viewer. Phenomena like these demonstrate that the interpretation of image-level information, which is what is directly available at the retina, depends on top-down processes that themselves utilize higher-level information (e.g., Kornmeier & Bach, 2012). The challenge of ambiguous input arises not only with static images like those shown in Fig. 1, but also with dynamic input. The identity of objects must be maintained acros
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