Directional Bias in the Perception of Translating Patterns

Abstract

Recent findings suggest that the visual system is biased by its past stimulation to detect one direction of motion over others. Three experiments were designed to investigate whether this bias is mediated by the direction or by the velocity of the past stimulation, and whether this bias is offset by contradictory pattern or depth information. Observers were presented with two solid or random-dot patterns that moved across a display screen in antiphase. As the two patterns reached the center of the screen, they became superimposed in such a way that their subsequent directions were ambiguous. Results from experiment 1 showed that the probability of perceiving these patterns as continuing to move in the same directions was significantly greater when they moved at a constant velocity than when they moved at a variable velocity. Results from experiments 2 and 3 revealed that this directional bias was reversed only gradually as an increasing amount of contradictory pattern information was introduced, but that this reversal was quite abrupt when a relatively small amount of contradictory depth information was introduced. Collectively, these results suggest that a directional bias in the perception of moving patterns is mediated not only by the direction of the previous stimulation, but also by the velocity of that stimulation. Moreover, the analyses of pattern and motion information appear relatively independent during the early stages of visual processing, but the analyses of depth and motion information appear considerably more interdependent.