ISSN : 1226-9654
Perceptual organization is a basic propensity of humans’ and animals’ to construct a meaningful whole from individual parts. By exploiting two Gestalt principles of perceptual organization, i.e., color similarity and good form, this study investigated how visual features that are distributed separately to each eye are organized perceptually. For this purpose, interocular grouping was utilized. Interocular grouping is a phenomenon in which incomplete features in two eyes are grouped complementarily and perceived as complete visual object during binocular rivalry. Both the color and the shape of partially occluded objects that comprised rival targets were manipulated. In the preliminary experiment, observers responded by tracking perceived shape. Results showed that color coherence enhances interocular grouping. Encouraged by these results, we specified the conditions into facilitation, neutral, and inhibition and compared the effect of color on shape-based tracking and the effect of shape on color-based tracking in the main experiment. Results showed that interocular grouping was enhanced when color facilitated shape-based grouping (facilitation condition in shape-based tracking). Enhanced interocular grouping was observed both when shape facilitated color-based grouping and when shape was neutral to color-based grouping (facilitation and neutral conditions in color-based tracking). In contrast, interocular grouping was reduced in the inhibition condition in both shape- and color-based tacking. Results suggest that perceptual organization is based on coordination of multiple features comprising an object and that the effect of color on grouping is relatively stronger than that of shape. To our knowledge, this study is the first to reveal the interaction of multiple visual dimensions in interocular grouping, which is a step forward from previous studies that only considered coexistence of those features.
When an visual event occurs, people try to infer the cause of the event. In this study, it was examined that, when an object changes its surface color, how its spatial distance or contact to another object influenced the perception of causality of the color change. The test animations consisted of two moving objects that were in green initially and one of them changed its surface color into red in the end of the movie. In the 4 different conditions, either the spatial distance or the number of contact between the two objects varied. A between-subjects design was introduced to blind the purpose of the experiment. The observers watched only one of the 4 movies randomly and they were asked to rate how strongly the target object's color change was influenced by the other object. In the result, the observers were more likely to attribute the cause of the color change into the other object in the contact conditions than the distance conditions. Therefore, we concluded that contact played a crucial role for the perception of causality of an object's surface color change event.
This study examined several problems when an Analysis of Covariance applies to a mixed design involving repeated measures variables, and suggested solutions for these problems. According to Keppel and ZeDeck (1989), except for the special case, the result of the standard Analysis of Variance(ANOVA) and that of the ANCOVA should not be different for the effects of repeated-measures variables. However, an ANCOVA using SPSS ver. 18.0 with sample data yielded different results using a standard ANOVA for within-subject variables. Actually, an ANCOVA using a Java Script program incorporating the statistical procedure by Keppel(1991) obtained different results from those with SPSS. However, results using SAS package where no interaction between repeated measure and covariate is assumed yielded the same results of KwakStat. It is concluded that whether the interaction between repeated measures variable and covariate variable is assumed or not may yield quite different results. Finally, several solutions were proposed to overcome these problems.
For too long, size perception research has been guided by the size distance invariance hypothesis (SDIH). Although research to validate this hypothesis has been largely inconclusive, the hypothesis has endured, perhaps in part because alternative information sources for size perception were lacking. Here, I propose an alternative binocular information source for size perception. An experiment was conducted to assess the utility of the proposed information and at the same time the perceptual independence of size and distance perception. Participants viewed a virtual object stereoscopically then judged its size and distance. Results were consistent with the proposed model’s prediction but inconsistent with the SDIH. The present findings were construed as evidence against the SDIH as an account of size perception for the binocular visual system.
The present work examined whether familiar but ignored shapes are perceived. Rock and Gutman(1981) demonstrated these shapes were indeed not perceived in an incidental learning task. Cho and Kim(2010), however, reported that depending upon instructions, unfamiliar shapes were processed in the same task. Using an instruction of internal structure encoding, a series of experiments was conducted to explore whether a familiar but ignored shape was perceived while a target was attended. Experiment 1 compared recognition rates for the familiar but ignored shapes (heart, lips and a circle) with those of unfamiliar ones. To control familarity due to shape orientations, Experiment 2 presented participants with upside- down shapes. In two experiments, the familiar nontargets did not show higher recognition rates than did the novel nontargets. The present study demonstrated new evidence for perception of ignored shapes regardless of their familarity.
Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of oral reading on word recognition. Experiment 1 aimed to examine how naming and lexical decision performances differ as a function of pre-task treatment: oral reading, silent reading, and non-verbal mental rotation. The results of Experiment 1 revealed no significant effect of oral reading on naming and lexical decision. In Experiment 2, how individual differences in subvocalization during reading modulates effects of oral reading was explored. For this, subvocalizers and non-subvocalizers were divided according to their scores in the articulatory suppression task. The results showed that subvocalizers performed naming better after a 10-minute oral reading practice. But, for lexical decision, subvocalizers did better in the silent reading condition, whereas non-subvocalizers did better in oral reading condition. The results from the two experiments were explained in terms of facilitaions in lexical access.
Virtual environments have been used in practice for industry, medicine, and education. Their best known utilizations are flight-training for pilots and driving simulation for various purposes such as research on assistive systems because the main advantage of virtual environments is that they construct a close to reality. Nowadays, we can easily experience the virtual environment in our living room with 3D TV and in neighborhood theater with real 3D movie. However, there are several reports about people who have claimed some symptoms of motion sickness during exposure to a virtual environment. This kind of motion sickness is called ‘cybersickness’. The general symptoms of cybersickness such as vertigo, headache, and nausea are quite similar to the ones of motion sickness. In contrast to motion sickness the user is stationary but the moving visual imagery induces the sensation of self-motion in virtual environment. Several studies suggested methods for reducing cybersickness, but due to diverse factors in exposure to virtual environments there is no key method for eliminating cybersickness so far. In this report we discuss the reasons for cybersickness induced by exposure to 3D virtual environments depicting sensory conflict theory and postural instability theory for cybersickness. Possible methods such as reducing field of view and using motion platform and rest frame, which have been suggested from previous studies for reducing this kind of sickness in exposure to 3D virtual environments are discussed.