Gravity’s impact on visual search asymmetries: is visual gravitational motion a visual feature or a familiar dynamic event?

• Autor(a) principal: Velado, Beatriz da Graça Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/39632
• topic: Motion perception; Event perception; Internal model of gravity; Visual search; Search asymmetry

A wealth of converging research lines has led support to the notion that specialized neural processes output aprioristic information about the expected effects of gravity to fine-tune motor and perceptual responses to dynamic events. Arguably, this putative internal model of gravity might modulate the efficiency in visual search for objects conforming or not to gravitationally coherent dynamics. In the present work, we explored this possibility with a visual search task involving arrays of 2 to 8 objects moving back-and-forth. The target could be a bouncing object with distractors moving periodically at a constant speed or the reverse. Moreover, the direction of the gravitational pull, as implied by the bouncing motion patterns, could be aligned or misaligned with Earth’s gravity. Overall, searches for bouncing targets were more efficient than periodic ones except, notoriously, when stimuli displays were congruent with Earth’s gravitational pull, in which case the visual search asymmetry disappeared. Outcomes are interpreted as reflecting the joint and mutually cancelling contribution of low-level detection of acceleration patterns and higher-level detection of unexpected violations of gravitational motion.