Relative Effects of Figural Noise and Rotation on the Visual Perception of Form

Abstract

48 Ss responded in a paper-and-pencil figure-cancellation task to 4-by-4 metric histoforms. Both random and constrained or “Redundancy-I” figures were used with both rotated and nonrotated noisefree choice figures, and with nonrotated choice figures perturbed by 12.5% and 25.0% visual cell noise. In terms of both the speed and accuracy of cancellation, perceptual performance with random figures was better than with constrained, and increases in visual noise produced monotonic decrements in performance. Although choice-figure rotation had no significant effect on accuracy, it produced decrements in speed equivalent to dectements that might be expected with nonrotated choice figures perturbed by 3.6% and 9 4% visual noise in the random and constrained-figure conditions, respectively.