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Psychological Science 2010

An Integration of Color and Motion Information in Visual Scene Analyses

Yasuki Noguchi1,2,3,4; Shinsuke Shimojo1,5; Ryusuke Kakigi6,7; Minoru Hoshiyama2,3

1 California Institute of Technology · 2 Department of Medical Sciences · 3 Nagoya University · 4 Kobe University · 5 Japan Science and Technology Agency · 6 The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI · 7 National Institute for Physiological Sciences

open access

Abstract

To analyze complex scenes efficiently, the human visual system performs perceptual groupings based on various features (e.g., color and motion) of the visual elements in a scene. Although previous studies demonstrated that such groupings can be based on a single feature (e.g., either color or motion information), here we show that the visual system also performs scene analyses based on a combination of two features. We presented subjects with a mixture of red and green dots moving in various directions. Although the pairings between color and motion information were variable across the dots (e.g., one red dot moved upward while another moved rightward), subjects' perceptions of the color-motion pairings were significantly biased when the randomly paired dots were flanked by additional dots with consistent color-motion pairings. These results indicate that the visual system resolves local ambiguities in color-motion pairings using unambiguous pairings in surrounds, demonstrating a new type of scene analysis based on the combination of two featural cues.

DOI
10.1177/0956797610393743
Sources
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