Abstract
A stimulus that is presented in apparent motion has shorter visible persistence than the same stimulus presented in isolation, a phenomenon known as motion deblurring. Here we show that disrupting the spatio-temporal continuity of stimuli in apparent motion causes a release from motion deblurring in that there is visible persistence of the stimulus under conditions in which little or no persistence occurs without the disruption. Observers viewed scenes in which a disc traveled around a central fixation point and underwent an abrupt change in appearance, either in the second-to-last or the last frame of motion. Different changes were tested including size, luminance, hue, and direction of motion. Control conditions included two discs in the final frame of motion, the original version and the changed version. Observers reported whether they perceived one or two discs in the final frame. When the change was large and in the second-to-last frame of motion, observers were nearly as likely to report having perceived two discs as they were in the control condition where two discs were physically present. This tendency decreased when the change was small and when the change was in the final frame of motion. The results suggest that motion deblurring occurs because of object-mediated updating. Updating representations of scenes requires that new information be appropriately associated with previously encoded information. We have argued that this process occurs within representations that have undergone considerable organization in terms of the components within the scene, and in particular, that updating is mediated through object representations. Under this view, a large spatio-temporal disruption triggers the establishment of a new object representation, which protects the original object representation from being overwritten. This in turn gives rise to visible persistence of that object and the perception of two objects, the original one and the new one.