Abstract
While visual perception is guided by the image cast on our retinas, there are many other influences at play. The process of constructing a percept is also influenced by a myriad of contextual cues. For example, evidence is emerging for a role of action in the formation of percepts (Maruya, Yang & Blake, 2007 Psych. Sci.). In the present study, we investigate whether this interaction between action and perception is plastic rather than simply due to innate biases. During training, subjects’ arm movements were associated with a particular unambiguous appearance of either a rotating necker cube or dot sphere. During testing, the cues, which disambiguated the stimuli, were removed and subjects were required to move their arm and make a judgement about the direction of perceived rotation. Subject responses revealed a reliable effect of arm movement on perceived direction of rotation, and that this was consistent with the direction seen during training. Importantly, we were able to demonstrate learning with participants forming arbitrary left-left, left-right, left-up, left-down contingencies between movement and perceived stimulus rotation. Earlier studies on visual perception have argued that arbitrary visual cues can be recruited to aid formation of a visual percept simply through a process of paired association between a known 'trusted' cue and the new arbitrary cue (Haijiang, Saunders, Stone & Backus, 2006 PNAS). Interestingly, not all cues can be recruited, regardless of whether they are reliable estimators of the perceptual event (Jain, Fuller, & Backus, 2010 PLoS). Our results suggest that cue recruitment provides robust effects in the multimodal domain of visuomotor behaviour.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013