Disambiguating ambiguous motion perception: what are the cues?

Alessandro Piedimonte,Anjan Chatterjee,Adam J Woods

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00902

Alessandro Piedimonte, Anjan Chatterjee + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00902

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Abstract

Motion perception is a fundamental feature of the human visual system. As part of our daily life we often have to determine the direction of motion, even in ambiguous (AMB) situations. These situations force us to rely on exogenous cues, such as other environmental motion, and endogenous cues, such as our own actions, or previously learned experiences. In three experiments, we asked participants to report the direction of an AMB motion display, while manipulating exogenous and endogenous sources of information. Specifically, in all three experiments the exogenous information was represented by another motion cue while the endogenous cue was represented, respectively, by movement execution, movement planning, or a learned association about the motion display. Participants were consistently biased by less AMB motion cues in the environment when reporting the AMB target direction. In the absence of less AMB exogenous motion information, participants were biased by their motor movements and even the planning of such movements. However, when participants learned a specific association about the target motion, this acquired endogenous knowledge countered exogenous motion cues in biasing participants’ perception. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that we disambiguate AMB motion using different sources of exogenous and endogenous cues, and that learned associations may be particularly salient in countering the effects of environmental cues.

Highlights

The ability to detect a movement in the environment is critical to survival
Attention driven by external events is referred to as bottom–up or exogenous attention whereas goal-driven attention is referred as top–down or endogenous attention (Posner and Cohen, 1984; MacLean et al, 2009)
We first calculated a Perception Index (PI) to represent the number of rightward (CW) directions of the outer circle perceived by each participant

Summary

Introduction

The ability to detect a movement in the environment is critical to survival. It is maintained across different species, and is important for predator and prey (Rokszin et al, 2010). Tracking the direction of movements in the visual environment is often easy but motion perception can be hampered by ambiguity in some situations. Multiple sources of information, exogenous, or endogenous, can help to solve this visual ambiguity. The effects of exogenous and endogenous cues have been studied for over a century, especially in the context of spatial attention (e.g., James, 1890; Corbetta and Shulman, 2002). While driving, we could look at exogenous cues such as direction indicators and predict which direction cars might go (i.e., an exogenous source of information). Like colors, shapes and motion, are automatically extracted from the visual

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