Collinear facilitation over space and depth.

The detection threshold of a Gabor target can be reduced by the presence of collinear flanking Gabors but is disrupted when the target and the flankers have different disparity. Here, we further investigated whether it is the depth or surface difference between the target and the flanker that causes the abolition of collinear facilitation. The target and the flankers were 1.6 cycle per degree vertical Gabor patches with a separation of three wavelength units between them. There were six viewing conditions: target and flankers were set (A) in the same frontoparallel plane in a collinear configuration, (B) at different disparities but embedded in the same slanted plane, (C) at different disparities in different frontoparallel planes (flankers occupied at the same depth), (D) at different disparities in different frontoparallel planes (flankers occupied at different depth), (E) in the same frontoparallel plane in a noncollinear configuration, and (F) at the same disparity but locally slanted. We measured the target contrast detection threshold with and without the flankers present with a temporal 2AFC paradigm with the Ψ staircase method. Strong collinear facilitation was observed when the target and the flankers were either in the same frontoparallel plane or embedded in the same slanted surface even though the target and the flankers were at different disparities. Our results suggest that it is the difference in surface assignment, not the difference in disparity per se, that causes the disruption of collinear facilitation.