Abstract

Motion perception can be elicited by the spatiotemporal matching of practically all visual attributes. The matching of some of them is effective in eliciting motion perception whether or not the remaining attributes are coherently matched. The mismatching of some of them (which we call veto attributes, e.g., color, spatial frequency, disparity) may disrupt and possibly cancel motion perception normally elicited by the matching of any of the remaining attributes. Our present results suggest that the above principles of visual spatiotemporal organizations also govern 2-D spatial grouping. Our experiments were designed to measure discriminability of texture pairs constructed by coherently matching either color or orientation or both in the (x, y) plane. The results show that (1) the strength of grouping is higher for color than for orientation matching, (2) color as well as orientation grouping is possible whether the textures are presented on a black background or in equiluminant conditions, and that (3) orientation grouping is impossible in equiluminant conditions when the orientation is matched across different colors, whereas color matching is possible across orientations.

© 1989 Optical Society of America