Abstract
Physical interactions between objects, or between an object and the ground, are amongst the most biologically relevant for live beings. Prior knowledge of Newtonian physics may play a role in disambiguating an object’s movement as well as foveation by increasing the spatial resolution of the visual input. Observers were shown a virtual 3D scene, representing an ambiguously rotating ball translating on the ground. The ball was perceived as rotating congruently with friction, but only when gaze was located at the point of contact. Inverting or even removing the visual context had little influence on congruent judgements compared with the effect of gaze. Counterintuitively, gaze at the point of contact determines the solution of perceptual ambiguity, but independently of visual context. We suggest this constitutes a frugal strategy, by which the brain infers dynamics locally when faced with a foveated input that is ambiguous.
Highlights
Physical interactions between objects, or between an object and the ground, are amongst the most biologically relevant for live beings
We evaluated the effect of gaze and visual context on the physical interpretation of ambiguous motion by asking observers to judge the rotation of a virtual ball embedded or not in a naturalistic 3D scene
We postulated that gaze plays an important role in disambiguating dynamic information in relation to its physical context
Summary
Between an object and the ground, are amongst the most biologically relevant for live beings. Prior knowledge of Newtonian physics may play a role in disambiguating an object’s movement as well as foveation by increasing the spatial resolution of the visual input. Gaze at the point of contact determines the solution of perceptual ambiguity, but independently of visual context We suggest this constitutes a frugal strategy, by which the brain infers dynamics locally when faced with a foveated input that is ambiguous. Our rich natural visual world contains too much information to constantly and uniformly sample at a high resolution This means that we often need to combine the visual input with prior assumptions about the physical world to disambiguate scenes. We evaluated the effect of gaze and visual context on the physical interpretation of ambiguous motion by asking observers to judge the rotation of a virtual ball embedded or not in a naturalistic 3D scene.
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