Abstract
Kinetic occlusion provides an important source of information for the perception of edge boundaries and allows the visual system to recover surfaces and objects in the environment. Previous work using kinetic occlusion displays found that spatial information has a greater impact on the perception of 2D shapes than does temporal information (Andersen & Cortese, 1989). In the current study we examined the role of kinetic occlusion in distinguishing the magnitude of curvature for different edge boundaries. The displays consisted of two sequentially presented stimuli (a standard and a comparison stimulus) of an opaque object in the center with a continuous background texture translating horizontally. We were interested in whether the discrimination of curved edges and the influence of temporal and spatial information were impacted by the magnitude of curvature. The magnitude of curvature variable had two conditions: in one the curved edge boundary started at a relatively low curvature and increased based on successful performance, while the other condition started at a higher curvature and decreased from there. Thresholds for curvature sensitivity were derived using a QUEST adaptive staircase procedure in a two (density of background texture) by two (velocity of background texture) by two (magnitude of curvature) design. Results matched the findings from our previous work indicating that both spatial and temporal information significantly impact the ability to detect curved edge boundaries. However spatial information was found to have a greater effect than temporal information in the high curvature magnitude condition, matching previous results on 2D shape perception.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018