September 2021
Volume 21, Issue 9
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   September 2021
Material recognition and the role of assumed viewing distance
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Jacob R. Cheeseman
    Justus Liebig University Giessen
  • Roland W. Fleming
    Justus Liebig University Giessen
    Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior (CMBB), University of Marburg and Justus Liebig University Giessen
  • Filipp Schmidt
    Justus Liebig University Giessen
    Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior (CMBB), University of Marburg and Justus Liebig University Giessen
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2017, “DyViTo: Dynamics in Vision and Touch”, Project ID 765121); Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB-TRR-135, “Cardinal Mechanisms of Perception”, Project ID 222641018–SFB/TRR 135 TP C1); European Research Council (ERC-2015-CoG-682859, “SHAPE”)
Journal of Vision September 2021, Vol.21, 1936. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.9.1936
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      Jacob R. Cheeseman, Roland W. Fleming, Filipp Schmidt; Material recognition and the role of assumed viewing distance. Journal of Vision 2021;21(9):1936. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.9.1936.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Surface material constancy under variations in object shape, illumination, and viewpoint is a remarkable achievement of the human visual system. Here, we investigated how the assumed viewing distance to a surface influences material recognition. A set of photographs depicting surfaces with ambiguous material identity were shown to observers, who provided estimates of apparent viewing distance and judgements of surface material for each image. In subsequent experiments, separate groups of observers were given contextual information about the spatial scale of the photographed scenes, either with explicit instructions (e.g., “the camera is very far from the surface”) or with objects of familiar size that were digitally inserted into the images. Our experiments demonstrate that for a subset of these images, the extent of between-group disagreement about the material identity of a surface is greater when observers have conflicting assumptions about the spatial scale of the scene. These findings also indicate that materials can have canonical spatial scales; that is, the plausibility of recognizing a given material category is constrained by its characteristic appearance across changes in viewing distance. Significantly, heuristics that exploit the interdependence of material appearance and viewing distance point to a previously unacknowledged generative constraint on the statistics of images that are diagnostic of material classes.

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