Effect of display resolution and antialiasing on the discrimination of simulated-aircraft orientation

In Experiment 1, antialiasing was found to improve performance on an orientation-discrimination task, whereas increasing display pixel-count did not. The latter finding was attributed to a decrease in image contrast associated with driving the CRT beyond its effective bandwidth. In Experiment 2, it was found that display resolution is the primary determinant of orientation-discrimination performance. This performance was not significantly improved by increasing antialiasing beyond a minimal level, suggesting that greater image detail can be substituted for antialias filtering. Finally, data obtained from an objective target-size calibration showed that nominal target size often does not accurately reflect the size (and hence distance) of simulated targets.