Abstract
As a study about visual processing estimating spatial intervals, Hisakata, Nishida and Johnston (2016) showed that the perceived distances or size became smaller after adaptation to dense texture. This new adaptation effect is difficult to be explained by the well-known density or size aftereffect. They proposed that visual system uses internal density representation as a metric to estimate spatial intervals. Here, we investigated the spatial properties of this aftereffect: especially the ocular dominance, the binocular disparity tuning and the coordinate dependence; retinotopic or spatiotopic. In all experiments, we used a texture comprised of white and black dots as the adapting textures and black circle as the test stimulus. The subjects’ task was to answer whether the left or right circle was larger: 2AFC task. In Experiment 1, we examined the interocular transfer and the results showed all most full transfers of adaptation effect. In Experiment 2 we investigated the binocular disparity tuning by presenting the adapting texture on different depth plane from test stimulus. The result showed that this phenomenon was insensitive to differences of disparities between the adapting and test stimuli. Furthermore, in Experiment 3, we investigated the spatial coordinate of the aftereffect and found that the effect occurred when the test stimulus was presented at both retinotopic and spatiotopic positions although the magnitude of effects decreased. These results suggest that mechanisms underlying this aftereffect will be based on higher visual processing. We will discuss the relationship between hierarchy of visual system and estimation of spatial intervals.