Perceiving the centroid of configurations on a rolling wheel

Undergraduates observed configurations of point-lights undergoing wheel-generated motions and judged how wheel-like the movement of each stimulus appeared on a 7-point scale. Viewer judgments were predicted by a metric defining the variable parameters for the motion path of each configuration’s geometric center—the centroid. The effects on judgments of eye movement and the stimulus characteristics of rotation, translation, and configuration were explored in six experiments. First, a strain operation on the dynamic stimuli did not affect the ability of the metric to predict perceptual judgments. Second, the predictive strength of the metric did not interact with the type of eye movements used in viewing the stimuli, though judged wheel-likeness was greater under pursuit vision than under static fixation. Third, variations in the extent of translation yielded little, if any, effect on observers’ judgments, nor did translation in a circular path. Finally, for stimuli having two lights extremely close together in the configuration, the metric’s predictive value was slightly lessened but only at the limits of visual acuity. Thus, within a wide range of presentation conditions, and for a wide variety of configurations, a metric that defined the variable parameters for the motion path of the centroid was an accurate predictor of observers’ judgments of goodness of perceived rotary motion.