The representation of moving 3-D objects in apparent motion perception

In the present research, we investigated the depth information contained in the representations of apparently moving 3-D objects. By conducting three experiments, we measured the magnitude of representational momentum (RM) as an index of the consistency of an object’s representation. Experiment 1A revealed that RM magnitude was greater when shaded, convex, apparently moving objects shifted to a flat circle than when they shifted to a shaded, concave, hemisphere. The difference diminished when the apparently moving objects were concave hemispheres (Experiment 1B). Using luminance-polarized circles, Experiment 2 confirmed that these results were not due to the luminance information of shading. Experiment 3 demonstrated that RM magnitude was greater when convex apparently moving objects shifted to particular blurred convex hemispheres with low-pass filtering than when they shifted to concave hemispheres. These results suggest that the internal object’s representation in apparent motion contains incomplete depth information intermediate between that of 2-D and 3-D objects, particularly with regard to convexity information with low-spatial-frequency components.