Reichel F D, Todd J T, Yilmaz E
Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
Percept Psychophys. 1995 Nov;57(8):1233-40. doi: 10.3758/bf03208379.
Many theoretical analyses of 3-dimensional form perception assume that visible surfaces in the environment are perceptually represented in terms of local mappings of metric depth and/or orientation. Although this approach is often taken for granted in the study of human vision, there have been relatively few attempts to demonstrate its psychological validity empirically. In an effort to shed new light on this issue, our research has been designed to investigate the accuracy with which observers can discriminate metric depth and orientation intervals on smoothly curved surfaces. Observers were presented with visual images of surfaces defined by shading and/or texture, on which two pairs of points were designated with small dots. In Experiment 1, their task was to identify which pair of points had a greater difference in depth; in Experiment 2 they were required to judge which pair had a greater difference in orientation. The Weber fractions obtained for these tasks were 10 to 100 times greater than those that have been reported for other types of sensory discrimination, indicating that the perception of metric structure from these displays is surprisingly coarse grained.
许多关于三维形状感知的理论分析都假定，环境中可见表面在感知上是根据度量深度和/或方向的局部映射来表征的。尽管这种方法在人类视觉研究中常常被视为理所当然，但相对较少有人尝试通过实证来证明其心理有效性。为了对这个问题有新的认识，我们的研究旨在调查观察者辨别平滑曲面上度量深度和方向间隔的准确程度。向观察者呈现由阴影和/或纹理定义的表面的视觉图像，图像上用小点指定了两对 点。在实验 1 中，他们的任务是识别哪对点在深度上有更大差异；在实验 2 中，要求他们判断哪对点在方向上有更大差异。从这些任务中获得的韦伯分数比其他类型的感官辨别所报告的分数大 10 到 100 倍，这表明从这些显示中感知度量结构的能力惊人地粗糙。
