Abstract
When several multistable displays are viewed simultaneously, their perception is synchronized, as they tend to be in the same perceptual state. Here, we investigated the possibility that perception may reflect embedded statistical knowledge of physical interaction between objects for specific combinations of displays and layouts. We used a novel display with two ambiguously rotating gears and an ambiguous walker-on-a-ball display. Both stimuli produce a physically congruent perception when an interaction is possible (i.e., gears counterrotate, and the ball rolls under the walker’s feet). Next, we gradually manipulated the stimuli to either introduce abrupt changes to the potential physical interaction between objects or keep it constant despite changes in the visual stimulus. We characterized the data using four different models that assumed (1) independence of perception of the stimulus, (2) dependence on the stimulus’s properties, (3) dependence on physical configuration alone, and (4) an interaction between stimulus properties and a physical configuration. We observed that for the ambiguous gears, the perception was correlated with the stimulus changes rather than with the possibility of physical interaction. The perception of walker-on-a-ball was independent of the stimulus but depended instead on whether participants responded about a relative motion of two objects (perception was biased towards physically congruent motion) or the absolute motion of the walker alone (perception was independent of the rotation of the ball). None of the two experiments supported the idea of embedded knowledge of physical interaction.
Highlights
When several multistable displays are viewed simultaneously, their perception is synchronized, as they tend to be in the same perceptual state
The data were fitted using four hierarchical models described below: (1) an independent perception model that assumed that participants’ perception was independent of stimulus manipulation and physical plausibility of an interaction between the objects (a.k.a. independent perception model); (2) model that assumed that changes in perception are proportional to changes in stimulus configuration (a.k.a. stimulusbased model); (3) a model that assumed that perception was different between stimulus configurations that allowed or did not allow for a physical interaction between two objects (a.k.a. physics-based model); (4) a hybrid interaction model that assumed that perception was differently influenced by stimulus configurations with and without a possibility of physical interaction (a.k.a. hybrid-interaction model)
We fitted the data using four hierarchical Bayesian models that (1) assumed that participants’ perception is independent of stimulus manipulation; (2) model that assumed that changes in perception are proportional to changes in stimulus configuration; (3) model that assumed that perception depended on whether a stimulus configuration allowed for a physical interaction between
Summary
When several multistable displays are viewed simultaneously, their perception is synchronized, as they tend to be in the same perceptual state. We investigated the possibility that perception may reflect embedded statistical knowledge of physical interaction between objects for specific combinations of displays and layouts. When several identical or similar multistable displays are viewed together, their perception tends to be synchronized, and they tend to be in the same dominant perceptual state most of the time Two identical or similar objects move through each other along a linear trajectory and appear to either “stream” through each other or “bounce” off each other (Burns & Zanker, 2000) The latter perception is facilitated by a sound that is thought to serve as auditory evidence for the collision and, bias perception towards the bounce (Scholl & Nakayama, 2002)
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