Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
9348550 Vision Research 2005 10 Pages PDF
Abstract
In dynamic visual environments, objects can differ from their backgrounds in terms of their associated temporal structure-the time course of changes in some stimulus property defining object and background. In a series of experiments, we investigated whether different “messengers” of temporal structure group into coherent spatial forms. Observers viewed arrays of Gabor patches in which different temporal structures designated figure and ground regions; extracting the figure required grouping across synchronized orientation, spatial frequency, phase, and/or contrast changes. Observers were able to extract spatial form from temporal structure even when information had to be combined across different messengers. Further, mixing messengers of temporal structure proved cost-free: task performance when grouping across messengers approximated performance when all information resided within a single messenger. Thus, the visual system can abstract temporal structure regardless of the messenger of the dynamic event; a coherent spatial structure emerges from this abstracted temporal structure.
Related Topics
Life Sciences Neuroscience Sensory Systems
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