Localizing moving objects: The importance of perceived speed
Wed-P12-Poster III-103
Presented by: Max Odenwald
The localization of dynamic stimuli in the human visual system is often biased, resulting in a systematic distortion of the localization process. For example, when participants are asked about the onset or offset location of a given target, systematic biases such as the Fröhlich effect or the Representational Momentum effect have been observed. These effects have been shown to be particularly sensitive to changes in target speed, in the sense that, greater target speeds typically produce stronger localization errors. While being a critical influencing factor, the speed aspect has been mostly reduced to its physical features, that is, physical speed was experimentally manipulated. Yet, studies have shown that physically identical speeds can be perceived differently by manipulating the appearance of the target and background. The present study therefore aims to investigate the possible influence of perceived, rather than physical speed, on the localization of onset and offset. To implement this, parameters regarding the appearance of target and background were manipulated to create different perceived speeds for three targets, while simultaneously keeping the physical target speeds constant. In a first step, our results clearly indicated that our manipulation was successful, that is, the three targets resulted in strong differences regarding perceived speeds. In a second step, our results indicated that perceived onset as well as offset location biases systematically increased with increasing perceived speed. This indicates the importance of perceived speeds in motion localization, and theoretical implications are discussed.
Keywords: Fröhlich Effect, Representational Momentum, perceived position, localisation, motion perception, speed perception, vision