Grouping local orientation and direction signals to extract spatial contours: Empirical tests of “association field” models of contour integration

Over the last decade or so a great deal of psychophysical research has attempted to delineate the principles by which local orientations and motions are combined across space to facilitate the detection of simple spatial contours. This has led to the development of “association field” models of contour detection which suggest that the strength of linking between neighbouring elements in an image, is determined by the degree to which they aligned along smooth (first-order) curves. To test this assumption we used a path detection paradigm to compare the ability of observers to identify the presence of contours defined by either spatial orientation, motion direction or by specific combinations of both types of visual attribute. The relative alignment of the local orientations and/or directions with respect to the axis of the depicted contour was systematically varied. For orientation-defined contours detection was best when the elements were aligned along (parallel with) the contour axis, approached chance levels for obliquely oriented elements and then improved for elements that were orthogonal to the contour axis (i.e., performance was a U-shaped function of degree of orientation misalignment). This pattern of results was found for both straight and curved contours and is not readily explicable in terms of current association field theories. For motion-defined contours, however, performance simply deteriorated as the relative directions of the constituent path elements were progressively misaligned with respect to the contour. Thus the rules by which local orientations are linked to define spatial contours are qualitatively different from those used for linking local directions and each may be mediated by distinct visual mechanisms. When both orientation and motion cues were simultaneously available, contour detection performance was generally enhanced, in a manner that is consistent with probability summation. We suggest that association field models of orientation linking may need to be extended in light of the present findings.