Consciousness mediated by neural transition states: How invisibly rapid motions can become visible

When observers view a rapidly moving stimulus they may see only a static streak. We report that there can be a transient percept of motion if such a moving stimulus is preceded or followed by a stationary image of that stimulus. A ring of dots was rotated so rapidly observers only saw a continuous outline circle and could not report its rotation direction. When an objectively stationary ring of dots preceded or followed this rotating ring, the stationary ring appeared to visibly launch into motion from a standstill or visibly rotate to a halt, principally in the same direction as the actual rapid rotation. Thus, motions too rapid to be consciously perceived as motion can nonetheless be processed by the visual system, and generate neural transition states that are consciously experienced as motion percepts. We suggest such transition states might serve a unifying function by bridging discontinuous motion states.     

Adventures with gelatinous ellipses--constraints on models of human motion analysis

An ellipse rotating rigidly about its center may appear to rotate rigidly or to deform nonrigidly so that it appears gelatinous. We use this ambiguous stimulus to study how motion information is propagated across space. We find that features that are quite far from the contour of the ellipse may have a strong influence on the percept of the ellipse, provided they move in a way consistent with the motion of the ellipse. We show that the percept cannot be accounted for by computational models that pool constraints over a local area only, or by models that propagate information along contours, or by models that indiscriminately propagate information across space. However, the percept can be accounted for by a class of models that assume smoothness in a layered representation.     

Perceiving object motion using vision and touch

In a previous experiment, we showed that bistable visual object motion was partially disambiguated by tactile input. Here, we investigated this effect further by employing a more potent visuotactile stimulus. Monocular viewing of a tangible wire-frame sphere (TS) rotating about its vertical axis produced bistable alternations of direction. Touching the TS biased simultaneous and subsequent visual perception of motion. Both of these biases were in the direction of the tactile stimulation and, therefore, constituted facilitation or priming, as opposed to interference or adaptation. Although touching the TS biased visual perception, tactile stimulation was not able to override the ambiguous visual percept. This led to periods of sensory conflict, during which visual and tactile motion percepts were incongruent. Visual and tactile inputs can sometimes be fused to form a coherent percept of object motion but, when they are in extreme conflict, can also remain independent.     

Flicker-light induced visual phenomena: frequency dependence and specificity of whole percepts and percept features

Flickering light induces visual hallucinations in human observers. Despite a long history of the phenomenon, little is known about the dependence of flicker-induced subjective impressions on the flicker frequency. We investigate this question using Ganzfeld stimulation and an experimental paradigm combining a continuous frequency scan (1–50 Hz) with a focus on re-occurring, whole percepts. On the single-subject level, we find a high degree of frequency stability of percepts. To generalize across subjects, we apply two rating systems, (1) a set of complex percept classes derived from subjects’ reports and (2) an enumeration of elementary percept features, and determine distributions of occurrences over flicker frequency. We observe a stronger frequency specificity for complex percept classes than elementary percept features. Comparing the similarity relations among percept categories to those among frequency profiles, we observe that though percepts are preferentially induced by particular frequencies, the frequency does not unambiguously determine the experienced percept.     

Discriminating rigid from nonrigid motion: minimum points and views

Theoretical investigations of structure from motion have demonstrated that an ideal observer can discriminate rigid from nonrigid motion from two views of as few as four points. We report three experiments that demonstrate similar abilities in human observers: In one experiment, 4 of 6 subjects made this discrimination from two views of four points; the remaining subjects required five points. Accuracy in discriminating rigid from nonrigid motion depended on the amount of nonrigidity (variance of the interpoint distances over views) in the nonrigid structure. The ability to detect a rigid group dropped sharply as noise points (points not part of the rigid group) were added to the display. We conclude that human observers do extremely well in discriminating between nonrigid and fully rigid motion, but that they do quite poorly at segregating points in a display on the basis of rigidity.     

Perception of objects that are translating and rotating

The motion of objects that are both translating and rotating can be decomposed into an infinite number of translational and rotational combinations. How, then, do such stimuli routinely elicit specific percepts and behavioral responses that are usually appropriate? A possible answer is that motion percepts are fully determined by the probability distributions of all the possible correspondences and differences in the stimulus sequence. To test the merits of this conceptual framework, we investigated the perceived motion elicited by a line that is both translating and rotating behind an aperture. When stimuli are presented such that a particular sequence of appearance and disappearance occurs at the aperture boundary, subjects report that the line is rotating only; furthermore, the perceived centers of rotation appear to describe a cycloidal trajectory, even when one aperture shape is replaced by another. These and other perceptual effects elicited by translating and rotating stimuli are all accurately predicted by the probability distribution of the possible sources of the physical movements, supporting the conclusion that motion perception is indeed generated by a wholly probabilistic strategy.     

The whole moves less than the spin of its parts

When individually moving elements in the visual scene are perceptually grouped together into a coherently moving object, they can appear to slow down. In the present article, we show that the perceived speed of a particular global-motion percept is not dictated completely by the speed of the local moving elements. We investigated a stimulus that leads to bistable percepts, in which local and global motion may be perceived in an alternating fashion. Four rotating dot pairs, when arranged into a square-like configuration, may be perceived either locally, as independently rotating dot pairs, or globally, as two large squares translating along overlapping circular trajectories. Using a modified version of this stimulus, we found that the perceptually grouped squares appeared to move more slowly than the locally perceived rotating dot pairs, suggesting that perceived motion magnitude is computed following a global analysis of form. Supplemental demos related to this article can be downloaded from app.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

The directional tuning of the barber-pole illusion.

In order to study the integration of local motion signals in the human visual system, we measured directional tuning curves for the barber-pole illusion by varying two crucial aspects of the stimulus layout independently across a wide a range in the same experiment. These were the orientation of the grating presented behind the rectangular aperture and the aspect ratio of the aperture, which in combination determine the relative contributions of local motion signals perpendicular to the gratings and parallel to the aperture borders, respectively. The strength of the illusion, ie the tendency to perceive motion along the major axis of the aperture, obviously depends on the spatial layout of the aperture, but also on grating orientation. Subjects were asked which direction they perceived and how compelling their motion percept was, revealing different strategies of the visual system to deal with the barber-pole stimulus. Some individuals respond strongly to the unambiguous motion information at the boundaries, leading to multistable percepts and multimodal distributions of responses. Others tend to report intermediate directions, apparently being less influenced by the actual boundaries. The general pattern of deviations from the motion direction perpendicular to grating orientation--a decrease with aspect ratio approaching unity (ie square-shaped apertures) and with gratings approaching parallel orientation to the shorter aperture boundary--is discussed in the context of simple phenomenological models of motion integration. The best fit between model predictions and experimental data is found for an interaction between two stimulus parameters: (i) cycle ratio, which is the sine-wave gratings equivalent of the terminator ratio for line gratings, describing the effects from the aperture boundaries, and (ii) the grating orientation, responsible for perpendicular motion components, which describes the influence of motion signals from inside the aperture. This suggests that the most simple cycle (terminator) ratio explanation cannot fully account for the quantitative properties of the barber-pole illusion.     

Perceptual organization of moving stimuli modulates the flash-lag effect

When a visual stimulus is flashed at a given location the moment a second moving stimulus arrives at the same location, observers report the flashed stimulus as spatially lagging behind the moving stimulus (the flash-lag effect). The authors investigated whether the global configuration (perceptual organization) of the moving stimulus influences the magnitude of the flash-lag effect. The results indicate that a flash presented near the leading portion of a moving stimulus lags significantly more than a flash presented near the trailing portion. This result also holds for objects consisting of several elements that group to form a unitary percept of an object in motion. The present study demonstrates a novel interaction between the global configuration of moving objects and the representation of their spatial position and may provide a new and useful tool for the study of perceptual organization.     

Coherence and transparency of moving plaids composed of Fourier and non-Fourier gratings

We examined the perceptual coherence of two-component moving plaids. The gratings that constituted the plaids were either standard Fourier gratings (F), in which luminance was determined by a drifting sinusoid, or non-Fourier gratings (NF), in which the contrast of a random background was modulated by a drifting sinusoid. These NF gratings are examples of stimuli that generate a compelling percept of motion, even though they fail to elicit a motion signal from motion analyzers based on standard cross-correlation (Chubb & Sperling, 1988). Naive observers viewed three types of stimuli consisting of superpositions of these two components: (1) two standard drifting gratings (F/F), (2) two non-Fourier drifting gratings (NF/NF), and (3) one standard and one non-Fourier drifting grating (F/NF). As expected, the F/F stimulus yielded a compelling percept of coherent motion. The dominant percept of all the observers for the NF/NF stimulus was one of coherent motion, provided that both gratings were visible and of approximately equal contrast. None of the observers reported a dominant percept of coherent motion for the F/NF condition, over a wide range of contrasts for the two grating components and across two varieties of NF gratings. In view of the results of Albright (1992) and Albright and Chaudhuri (1989), that show that single cells in macaque V1 and MT respond to both F and NF motion, one cannot interpret our findings as evidence that F and NF motion are processed independently. Alternative, “higher level” interpretations based on the intrinsically ambiguous nature of the stimuli and physical laws governing the appearance of transparent objects are discussed.     

Percepts of rigid motion within and across apertures.

Humans consistently err in their percepts of rotational motion viewed through an aperture. Such errors provide insight into the constraints observers use to interpret retinal images. In the 1st of 2 experiments, Ss consistently perceived the fixed center of rotation for an unmarked line viewed through an aperture as located on the line, regardless of its actual location. Accuracy greatly improved with visible line endings. This finding was extended to explain why a square appears nonrigid when it rotates behind a partial occluder. This illusion may result from observers misperceiving the center of rotation of the unmarked square sides. In this situation, Ss seemed unable to apply an object rigidity constraint across apertures. These findings support a conceptualization of the visual system in which consistent local information must be clearly present before prior knowledge can be used to interpret retinal stimulation.     

Detection of temporal order of noise-like luminance functions

We study the capacities of human observers to time order light sources that emit dynamic noise, identical for the different light sources, except for an adjustable delay. There is a range of temporal delays for which human observers are perfectly able to perform this task, using the direction of the motion percept that is evoked by the stimulus as a cue. An optimal delay between light sources at which the observers are most robust against any deterioration of the stimulus is defined. We claim that optimal delays (15–25 msec) correspond to the time delay of a putative Reichardt correlation mechanism in human motion vision. Contrary to the ability of human observers to sense temporal correlations in noise sequences, observers are totally unable to detect anticorrelation between noise sequences. This inability rules out motion opponency as a viable model for human front-end (“early”) motion vision.     

Coherence and transparency of moving plaids composed of Fourier and non-Fourier gratings.

We examined the perceptual coherence of two-component moving plaids. The gratings that constituted the plaids were either standard Fourier gratings (F), in which luminance was determined by a drifting sinusoid, or non-Fourier gratings (NF), in which the contrast of a random background was modulated by a drifting sinusoid. These NF gratings are examples of stimuli that generate a compelling percept of motion, even though they fail to elicit a motion signal from motion analyzers based on standard cross-correlation (Chubb & Sperling, 1988). Naive observers viewed three types of stimuli consisting of superpositions of these two components: (1) two standard drifting gratings (F/F), (2) two non-Fourier drifting gratings (NF/NF), and (3) one standard and one non-Fourier drifting grating (F/NF). As expected, the F/F stimulus yielded a compelling percept of coherent motion. The dominant percept of all the observers for the NF/NF stimulus was one of coherent motion, provided that both gratings were visible and of approximately equal contrast. None of the observers reported a dominant percept of coherent motion for the F/NF condition, over a wide range of contrasts for the two grating components and across two varieties of NF gratings. In view of the results of Albright (1992) and Albright and Chaudhuri (1989), that show that single cells in macaque V1 and MT respond to both F and NF motion, one cannot interpret our findings as evidence that F and NF motion are processed independently. Alternative, "higher level" interpretations based on the intrinsically ambiguous nature of the stimuli and physical laws governing the appearance of transparent objects are discussed.     

Learning to see stereokinetic effects

The Saturn illusion is a stereokinetic effect that occurs when a flat pattern composed of a full ellipse with two symmetrical semirings is rotated slowly in the frontoparallel plane. Subjects report seeing an egg-shaped object inserted into a circular ring, and the two objects move solidly into 3-D space as a single rigid body. Inexperienced observers show a conspicuous delay before reaching this percept. Two experiments are reported in which it is shown that this incubation time progressively decreases with repeated exposures to the stimulus pattern. A certain amount of time (14 s on average) is, however, required to obtain the effect, even after six successive exposures. It is argued that this time, which is independent of the speed of rotation and is not further reducible, is a fixed entity and is needed to compute the most rigid 3-D solution from deformations in the 2-D image. The results are discussed in relation to current theories of perception of structure from motion.     

Multiplicative effects of intention on the perception of bistable apparent motion

When viewing ambiguous displays, observers can, via intentional efforts, affect which perceptual interpretation they perceive. Specifically, observers can increase the probability of seeing the desired percept. Little is known, however, about how intentional efforts interact with sensory inputs in exerting their effects on perception. In two experiments, the current study explored the possibility that intentional efforts might operate by multiplicatively enhancing the stimulus-based activation of the desired perceptual representation. Such a possibility is suggested by recent neurophysiological research on attention. In support of this idea, when we presented bistable apparent motion displays under stimulus conditions differentially favoring one motion percept over the other, observers' intentional efforts to see a particular motion were generally more effective under conditions in which stimulus factors favored the intended motion percept.     

Perceptual alternations in stereokinesis

When a flat ellipse is slowly rotated in the frontoparallel plane, two different 3-D percepts can be obtained: (i) a rigid circular disc tilting back and forth in 3-D space, and (ii) an elongated egg, slanted into 3-D space, whose end parts seem to be located at different distances from the observer and describe a circular trajectory with respect to the frontal plane. Under prolonged observation, the two 3-D percepts alternate in time, separated by brief intervals in which either the rotation of a rigid flat ellipse in the frontal plane or an amoeba-like distortion of a 2-D shape can be perceived. An experiment is reported in which the sequence of perceptual alternations was investigated. Results show that the 3-D disc is mostly preceded by impressions of elastic amoeba-like deformations, whereas the 3-D egg is mostly preceded by the percept of a rotating flat ellipse. Direct transitions from egg to disc are not as frequent as transitions from disc to egg. Results are discussed in relation to Braunstein and Andersen's hypothesis that phenomena of this sort might result from the stimulation of automatic mechanisms for perceiving size change (changing-size neutral channels).     

The perceptual fate of letters in two kinds of apparent movement displays

Two experiments investigated the importance of figurai relationships among stimulus elements in the determination of the kind of motion perceived in bistable apparentovement displays. Stimulus frames containing the words MITE and ITEM were constructed in such a way that the letters I, T, and E appeared in corresponding locations while the M was in disparate locations between frames. When the frames were alternated with a 20-msec ISI, observers maintained local figurai identity in their percepts of apparent movement. However, when the frames were alternated with an 80-msec ISI, observers reported apparent movement of the entire groups of letters and thereby ignored figurai relationships in their percepts of apparent movement. In a second experiment, it was found that figurai nonidentity between elements of successive frames always resulted in apparent movement of a perceptual group or “blob” regardless of ISI. It is suggested that short-range apparent-movement percepts rely strongly upon figurai identity among corresponding stimulus elements, whereas long-range apparent-movement percepts do not.     

A temporal same-object advantage in the tunnel effect: facilitated change detection for persisting objects

Meaningful visual experience requires computations that identify objects as the same persisting individuals over time, motion, occlusion, and featural change. This article explores these computations in the tunnel effect: When an object moves behind an occluder, and then an object later emerges following a consistent trajectory, observers irresistibly perceive a persisting object, even when the pre- and postocclusion views contrast featurally. This article introduces a new change detection method for quantifying percepts of the tunnel effect. Observers had to detect color changes in displays where several objects oscillated behind occluders and occasionally changed color. Across comparisons with several types of spatiotemporal gaps, as well as manipulations of occlusion versus implosion, performance was better when objects' kinematics gave the impression of a persisting individual. The results reveal a temporal same-object advantage: better change detection across temporal scene fragments bound into the same persisting object representations. This suggests that persisting objects are the underlying units of visual memory.     

Being confident without seeing: What subjective measures of visual consciousness are about

Can observers be confident about the accuracy of a discrimination response without a visual experience of the stimulus? In a series of five experiments, observers performed a masked orientation discrimination task, a masked shape discrimination task, or a random-dot motion discrimination task, followed by two subjective ratings after each trial, in which participants reported either their visual experience of the stimulus or their confidence in being correct. We observed that the threshold for ratings of the perception of the stimulus was above the threshold for ratings of a decision, that decision ratings outperformed stimulus ratings in predicting trial accuracy, and that different decision-related scales were more strongly associated with other decision-related scales than with ratings of stimulus clarity. We propose a taxonomy of subjective measures of consciousness that differentiates between subjective measures relating to the percept of the stimulus and measures relating to a discrimination decision and discuss the relation to type II blindsight.     

Primed and unprimed rebounding illusory apparent motion

Although sequences of uncorrelated random dots can yield a wide range of illusorily coherent motion percepts (including translation, rotation, contraction, expansion, shear, and rebounding motion), past priming studies have relied on two-alternative forced choice tasks that only measure unidirectional (positive or negative) priming effects. In Experiment 1 we showed that when participants are primed with unidirectional motion and given an additional option to report bidirectional (rebounding) motion, they do so frequently, suggesting that unidirectional motion can “default” to a rebounding percept. Furthermore, rebounding percepts are more prevalent during trials with long frame durations, suggesting a role for attention in forming and maintaining these illusory percepts. In Experiment 2 we compared rebounding percepts that followed unidirectional, drifting primes with rebounding percepts that followed bidirectional, rebounding primes, and found that these two types of illusory rebounding motion percepts differ systematically in their temporal structures. We argue that rebounding percepts following drifting primes can be understood as a breakdown of positive priming into an underlying oscillatory state, whereas rebounding percepts following rebounding primes may be understood either as (1) the initialization of the same oscillatory process, or (2) the entrainment of a two-step motion pattern by a higher-order mechanism.