Abstract
Under normal viewing conditions, a briefly presented stimulus remains visible for approximately 120 ms, after the stimulus offset. Due to this phenomenon, formally known as visible persistence, moving objects should appear highly smeared. Yet our perception of objects in motion remains relatively sharp and clear. Recent studies have indicated that many visual attributes of a target stimulus are computed according to non-retinotopic reference frames. In the present study, we use a variation of the Ternus-Pikler paradigm to study the temporal characteristics of the perceptual fields induced by non-retinotopic reference frames. Our previous studies have shown that the perceptual fields of neighboring dynamic reference frames interact. In other words, the presence of a secondary perceptual field in the neighborhood of a dynamic reference frame can modulate perception of target motion about the main reference. In Experiment I of the present study, we examine whether or not a neighboring perceptual field can facilitate perception of non-retinotopic target motion about a static reference. Our results indicate that the presence of a neighboring dynamic reference can indeed induce perception of target motion about a static reference. In Experiments II and III, we utilize the paradigm introduced in Experiment I to explore the temporal characteristics of non-retinotopic reference frames. The magnitude of the perceptual field effect on the target stimulus is found to be maximized when the target and reference stimuli are temporally in phase. The strength of the perceptual field is also found to decrease as the target-reference phase shift is increased.