Paradoxical stabilization of relative position in moving frames.

To capture where things are and what they are doing, the visual system may extract the position and motion of each object relative to its surrounding frame of reference [K. Duncker, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 161-172 (1929) and G. Johansson, Acta Psychol (Amst.) 7, 25-79 (1950)]. Here we report a particularly powerful example where a paradoxical stabilization is produced by a moving frame. We first take a frame that moves left and right and we flash its right edge before, and its left edge after, the frame's motion. For all frame displacements tested, the two edges are perceived as stabilized, with the left edge on the left and right edge on the right, separated by the frame's width as if the frame were not moving. This stabilization is paradoxical because the motion of the frame itself remains visible, albeit much reduced. A second experiment demonstrated that unlike other motion-induced position shifts (e.g., flash lag, flash grab, flash drag, or Fröhlich), the illusory shift here is independent of speed and is set instead by the distance of the frame's travel. In this experiment, two probes are flashed inside the frame at the same physical location before and after the frame moves. Despite being physically superimposed, the probes are perceived widely separated, again as if they were seen in the frame's coordinates and the frame were stationary. This paradoxical stabilization suggests a link to visual stability across eye movements where the displacement of the entire visual scene may act as a frame to stabilize the perception of relative locations.

Influence of frame and probe paths on the frame effect.

Moving frames produce large displacements in the perceived location of flashed and continuously moving probes. In a series of experiments, we test the contributions of the probe's displacement and the frame's displacement on the strength of the frame's effect. In the first experiment, we find a dramatic position shift of flashed probes whereas the effect on a continuously moving probe is only one-third as strong. In Experiment 2, we show that the absence of an effect for the static probe is a consequence of its perceptual grouping with the static background. As long as the continuously present probe has some motion, it appears to group to some extent with the frame and show an illusory shift of intermediate magnitude. Finally, we informally explored the illusory shifts seen for a continuously moving probe when the frame itself has a more complex path. In this case, the probe appears to group more strongly with the frame. Overall, the effects of the frame on the probe demonstrate the outcome of a competition between the frame and the static background in determining the frame of reference for the probe's perceived position.

Contribution of low-level motion to position shifts.

Motion can produce large changes in the apparent locations of briefly flashed tests presented on or near the motion. These motion-induced position shifts may have a variety of sources. They may be due to a frame effect where the moving pattern provides a frame of reference for the locations of events within it. The motion of the background may act through high-level mechanisms that track its explicit contours or the motion may act on position through the signals from low-level motion detectors. Here we isolate the contribution of low-level motion by eliminating explicit contours and trackable features. In this case, motion still supports a robust shift in probe locations with the shift being in the direction of the motion that follows the probe. Although robust, the magnitude of the shift in our first experiment is about 20% of the shift seen in a previous study with explicit frames and, in the second, about 45% of that found with explicit frames. Clearly, low-level motion alone can produce position shifts although the magnitude is much reduced compared to that seen when high-level mechanisms can contribute.

Motion-induced distortion of shape.

Motion, position, and form are intricately intertwined in perception. Motion distorts visual space, resulting in illusory position shifts such as flash-drag and flash-grab effects. The flash-grab displaces a test by up to several times its size. This lets us use it to investigate where the motion-induced shift operates in the processing stream from photoreceptor activation to feature activation to object recognition. We present several canonical, highly familiar forms and ask whether the motion-induced shift operates uniformly across the form. If it did, we could conclude that the effect occurred after the elements of the form are bound. However, we find that motion-induced distortion affects not only the position, but also the appearance of briefly presented, canonical shapes (square, circle, and letter T). Features of the flashed target that were closest to its center were shifted in the direction of motion more than those further from its center. Outline shapes were affected more than filled shapes, and the strength of the distortion increased with the contrast of the moving background. This not only supports a nonuniform spatial profile for the motion-induced shift but also indicates that the shift operates before the shape is established, even for highly familiar shapes like squares, circles, and letters.

A motion-induced position shift that depends on motion both before and after the test probe.

Two versions of the flash grab illusion were used to examine the relative contributions of motion before and motion after the test flash to the illusory position shift. The stimulus in the first two experiments was a square pattern that expanded and contracted with an outline square flashed each time the motion reversed producing a dramatic difference in perceived size between the two reversals. Experiment 1 showed a strong illusion when motion was present before and after the flashed tests or just after the flashes, but no significant effect when only the pre-flash motion was present. In Experiment 2, motion always followed the flash, and the duration of the pre-flash motion was varied. The results showed a significant increase in illusion strength with the duration of pre-flash motion and the effect of the pre-flash motion was almost 50% that of the post-flash motion. Finally, Experiment 3 tested the position shifts when the linear motion of a disk before the flash was orthogonal to its motion after the flash. Here, the results again showed that the pre-flash motion made a significant contribution, about 32% that of the post-flash motion. Several models are considered and even though all fail to some degree, they do offer insights into the nature of the illusion. Finally, we show that the empirical measure of the relative contribution of motion before and after the flash can be used to distinguish the mechanisms underlying different illusions.

Exploring the frame effect.

Probes flashed within a moving frame are dramatically displaced (Özkan, Anstis, 't Hart, Wexler, & Cavanagh, 2021; Wong & Mack, 1981). The effect is much larger than that seen on static or moving probes (induced motion, Duncker, 1929; Wallach, Bacon, & Schulman, 1978). These flashed probes are often perceived with the separation they have in frame coordinates-a 100% effect (Özkan et al., 2021). Here, we explore this frame effect on flashed tests with several versions of the standard stimulus. We find that the frame effect holds for smoothly or abruptly displacing frames, even when the frame changed shape or orientation between the end points of its travel. The path could be nonlinear, even circular. The effect was driven by perceived not physical motion. When there were competing overlapping frames, the effect was determined by which frame was attended. There were a number of constraints that limited the effect. A static anchor near the flashes suppressed the effect but an extended static texture did not. If the probes were continuous rather than flashed, the effect was abolished. The observational reports of 30 online participants suggest that the frame effect is robust to many variations in its shape and path and leads to a perception of flashed tests in their locations relative to the frame as if the frame were stationary. Our results highlight the role of frame continuity and of the grouping of the flashes with the frame in generating the frame effect.

The Paradox of Extreme Close-Up Gaze.

If somebody gazes at your left eye, you perceive them as looking straight at you. They switch their gaze with a single saccade to your right eye. You see their eyes move, yet they paradoxically end up still looking straight at you. Comparable paradoxical effects can arise when you view your own selfie image on a phone screen-but not when you look in a mirror.

Brief presentation enhances various simultaneous contrast effects.

Kaneko and Murakami (2012) demonstrated that simultaneous contrast for brightness and color (chromatic saturation) were enhanced by flashing the stimulus very briefly (10 ms). Here we examined whether this effect of duration generalized to other visual features. Tilt illusion and simultaneous hue contrast were both shown to be much stronger with a stimulus duration of 10 ms compared with 500 ms. The similar temporal dynamics for simultaneous contrast across visual features suggest common underlying principles.

Orbiting Black/White Rays Produce an "Illusory" Gray Disk.

An orbiting ray pattern produces an unexpected gray disk. Here we demonstrate this visual effect and its possible insights into visual temporal integration.

Perceived depth from shading boundaries.

Shading is well known to provide information the visual system uses to recover the three-dimensional shape of objects. We examined conditions under which patterns in shading promote the experience of a change in depth at contour boundaries, rather than a change in reflectance. In Experiment 1, we used image manipulation to illuminate different regions of a smooth surface from different directions. This manipulation imposed local differences in shading direction across edge contours (delta shading). We found that increasing the angle of delta shading, from 0° to 180°, monotonically increased perceived depth across the edge. Experiment 2 found that the perceptual splitting of shading into separate foreground and background surfaces depended on an assumed light source from above prior. Image regions perceived as foreground structures in upright images appeared farther in depth when the same images were inverted. We also found that the experienced break in surface continuity could promote the experience of amodal completion of colored contours that were ambiguous as to their depth order (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that the visual system can identify occlusion relationships based on monocular variations in local shading direction, but interprets this information according to a light source from above prior of midlevel visual processing.

Why hearts flutter: Distorted dim motions.

When a display of red spots or hearts on a blue surround is moved around under dim light, the spots appear to wobble or flutter relative to the surround (the "fluttering hearts" effect). We explain this as follows: Rods and cones both respond to the hearts. Rods are more sluggish than cones, with a latency of ∼50 ms, and they are also much more sensitive to blue than to red (the Purkinje shift; Purkinje, 1825). Thus a red spot oscillating on a blue ground produces a double image: a light spot seen by the cones, followed by a trailing dark spot seen by the rods. These interacting spots of opposite luminance polarity move like "reverse phi" (Anstis, 1970) and this generates the fluttering hearts effect. We find that hearts flutter most markedly at or near mesopic equiluminance, when the red is lighter than the blue as seen by the cones, but darker than the blue as seen by the rods. These same red/blue luminance ratios give rise to two new illusions: the ghostly twin illusion, and the reversal of red/blue grating movement.

Parietal cortex mediates conscious perception of illusory gestalt.

Grouping local elements into a holistic percept, also known as spatial binding, is crucial for meaningful perception. Previous studies have shown that neurons in early visual areas V1 and V2 can signal complex grouping-related information, such as illusory contours or object-border ownerships. However, relatively little is known about higher-level processes contributing to these signals and mediating global Gestalt perception. We used a novel bistable motion illusion that induced alternating and mutually exclusive vivid conscious experiences of either dynamic illusory contours forming a global Gestalt or moving ungrouped local elements while the visual stimulation remained the same. fMRI in healthy human volunteers revealed that activity fluctuations in two sites of the parietal cortex, the superior parietal lobe and the anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS), correlated specifically with the perception of the grouped illusory Gestalt as opposed to perception of ungrouped local elements. We then disturbed activity at these two sites in the same participants using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). TMS over aIPS led to a selective shortening of the duration of the global Gestalt percept, with no effect on that of local elements. The results suggest that aIPS activity is directly involved in the process of spatial binding during effortless viewing in the healthy brain. Conscious perception of global Gestalt is therefore associated with aIPS function, similar to attention and perceptual selection.

Contour adaptation.

It is known that adaptation to a disk that flickers between black and white at 3-8 Hz on a gray surround renders invisible a congruent gray test disk viewed afterwards. This is contrast adaptation. We now report that adapting simply to the flickering circular outline of the disk can have the same effect. We call this "contour adaptation." This adaptation does not transfer interocularly, and apparently applies only to luminance, not color. One can adapt selectively to only some of the contours in a display, making only these contours temporarily invisible. For instance, a plaid comprises a vertical grating superimposed on a horizontal grating. If one first adapts to appropriate flickering vertical lines, the vertical components of the plaid disappears and it looks like a horizontal grating. Also, we simulated a Cornsweet (1970) edge, and we selectively adapted out the subjective and objective contours of a Kanisza (1976) subjective square. By temporarily removing edges, contour adaptation offers a new technique to study the role of visual edges, and it demonstrates how brightness information is concentrated in edges and propagates from them as it fills in surfaces.

Up is best.

Ambiguous patterns have a tendency to appear to point up. This bias makes sense as most objects are on the ground, pointing up. However, we discover that the source of the up bias is the preference for seeing depth receding from the lower to the upper visual field.

The furrow illusion: peripheral motion becomes aligned with stationary contours.

A spot moved vertically up and down across a background grating that was tilted at 45°. In foveal vision this was seen accurately, but when viewed peripherally the spot's path was perceptually attracted toward the grating orientation, and at large eccentricities (>20°) the spot appeared to move at 45°, parallel to the grating. The intersections between the grating and the moving spot drive this illusion, revealing profound differences between fovea and periphery in processing visual motion.

Luminance contours can gate afterimage colors and "real" colors.

It has long been known that colored images may elicit afterimages in complementary colors. We have already shown (Van Lier, Vergeer, & Anstis, 2009) that one and the same adapting image may result in different afterimage colors, depending on the test contours presented after the colored image. The color of the afterimage depends on two adapting colors, those both inside and outside the test. Here, we further explore this phenomenon and show that the color-contour interactions shown for afterimage colors also occur for "real" colors. We argue that similar mechanisms apply for both types of stimulation.

The motion-induced shift in the perceived location of a grating also shifts its aftereffect.

Motion can bias the perceived location of a stationary stimulus (Whitney & Cavanagh, 2000), but whether this occurs at a high level of representation or at early, retinotopic stages of visual processing remains an open question. As coding of orientation emerges early in visual processing, we tested whether motion could influence the spatial location at which orientation adaptation is seen. Specifically, we examined whether the tilt aftereffect (TAE) depends on the perceived or the retinal location of the adapting stimulus, or both. We used the flash-drag effect (FDE) to produce a shift in the perceived position of the adaptor away from its retinal location. Subjects viewed a patterned disk that oscillated clockwise and counterclockwise while adapting to a small disk containing a tilted linear grating that was flashed briefly at the moment of the rotation reversals. The FDE biased the perceived location of the grating in the direction of the disk's motion immediately following the flash, allowing dissociation between the retinal and perceived location of the adaptor. Brief test gratings were subsequently presented at one of three locations-the retinal location of the adaptor, its perceived location, or an equidistant control location (antiperceived location). Measurements of the TAE at each location demonstrated that the TAE was strongest at the retinal location, and was larger at the perceived compared to the antiperceived location. This indicates a skew in the spatial tuning of the TAE consistent with the FDE. Together, our findings suggest that motion can bias the location of low-level adaptation.