Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Jul 1;24(7):1341-7. doi: 10.1177/0956797612472344. Epub 2013 May 30.
The perception of verticality is critical for balance control and interaction with the world. But this complex process fails badly under certain circumstances-usually as the result of an illusion. Here, we report on a real-world example of how the brain fails to disregard body position on a moving mountain tram and adopts an inappropriate frame of reference, which prompts passengers to perceive skyscrapers leaning by as much as 30°. To elucidate the sensory origin of this misperception, we conducted field experiments on the moving tram to systematically disentangle the contributions of four sensory systems known to affect verticality perception, namely, vestibular, tactile, proprioceptive, and visual cues. Our results refute the intuitive assumption that the perceived tilt of the buildings is based on visual error signals and demonstrate instead that a unified percept of verticality is a product of the synergistic interaction among multiple sensory systems and the contextual information available in the real world.
垂直感对于平衡控制和与世界的交互至关重要。但在某些情况下，这个复杂的过程会严重失效——通常是由于错觉。在这里，我们报告了一个现实世界中的例子，说明大脑在移动的山路上如何无法忽略身体的位置，并采用了不适当的参照系，这促使乘客感觉到摩天大楼倾斜了多达 30°。为了解阐明这种错觉的感觉来源，我们在移动的电车上进行了现场实验，系统地分离了已知影响垂直感的四个感觉系统的贡献，即前庭、触觉、本体感觉和视觉线索。我们的结果反驳了一个直观的假设，即建筑物的感知倾斜是基于视觉误差信号，而是表明，垂直感的统一感知是多个感觉系统的协同相互作用和现实世界中可用的上下文信息的产物。
