Abstract
Using alternating frames containing circular patches of vertical sinusoidal gratings, we investigated the effects of spatial frequency and contrast on the perception of end-to-end element and group motion in bistable motion. Experiment 1 showed that for a fixed physical contrast of .33, the percentage of reports of group motion tended to decrease across interstimulus intervals (ISIs) as spatial frequency increased from 1.5 to 6.0 cycles per degree (cpd), In Experiment 2, increasing the contrast of 1.5-cpd elements from .11 to .33 increased the percentage of group motion reports across ISIs. In Experiment 3, we set the physical contrasts of the 1.5- and 3.0-cpd grating patches to match subjectively the apparent contrast of the 6.0-cpd grating set at a physical contrast of .33. With such subjectively equated contrasts, the spatial frequency-dependent trend found in Experiment 1 was either attenuated or eliminated. These results (1) implicate the role of spatial frequency- and contrast-dependent pattern persistence effects on the perception of bistable motion, and (2) in the context of prior studies, suggest that the contribution of this general persistence effect to the perception of bistable motion is independent of the intrinsic spatial scale properties that characterize motion detectors.
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Breitmeyer, B.G., May, J.G. & Williams, M.C. Spatial frequency and contrast effects on percepts of bistable stroboscopic motion. Perception & Psychophysics 44, 525–531 (1988). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03207486
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03207486