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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Quoc Vuong
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Investigators have proposed that qualitative shapes are the primitive information of spatial vision: They preserve an approximately one-to-one mapping between surfaces, images, and perception. Given their importance, we examined how the visual system recovers these primitives from sparse disparity fields that do not provide sufficient information for their recovery. We hypothesized that the visual system interpolates sparse disparities with planes, resulting in a patchwork approximation of the implicitly defined shapes. We presented observers with stereo displays simulating planar or smooth curved surfaces having different curvatures. The observers’ task was to detect whether dots deviated from these surfaces or to discriminate planar from curved or planar from scrambled surfaces. Consistent with our hypothesis, increasing curvature had detrimental effects on observers’ performance (Experiments 1–3). Importantly, this patchwork approximation leads to the recovery of the proposed shape primitives, since observers were more accurate at discriminating planar-from-curved than planar-from scrambled surfaces with matched disparity range (Experiment 4).
Author(s): Vuong QC, Domini F, Caudek C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Perception and Psychophysics
Year: 2004
Volume: 66
Issue: 7
Pages: 1246-1259
Print publication date: 02/02/2011
ISSN (print): 1943-3921
ISSN (electronic): 1943-393X
Publisher: Springer New York LLC
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03196849
DOI: 10.3758/BF03196849
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