Search results for "Visual angle"

The impact of rear-view mirror distance and curvature on judgements relevant to road safety

2011

We report two experiments that investigate the impact of rear-view mirror distance and curvature on distance, spacing, and time-to-contact (TTC) judgements. The variation in mirror distance had a significant effect on TTC judgements, but only marginally influenced distance and spacing estimations. As mirror distance increased, TTC was overestimated, which is potentially dangerous. Control conditions with identical visual angles across different mirror distances revealed that effects were not solely caused by variation in visual angle. The impact of mirror curvature moderated the effect. While observers were unable to compensate for the mirror distance effect, they could do so for the distor…

Allocentric time-to-contact and the devastating effect of perspective

2014

AbstractWith regard to impending object–object collisions, observers may use different sources of information to judge time to contact (tC). We introduced changes of the observer’s vantage point to test among three sets of hypotheses: (1) Observers may use a distance-divided-by-velocity algorithm or, alternatively, elaborated τ-formulae, all of which give exact tC information; (2) observers may use simple τ-formulae (i.e., formulae of the type: visual angle divided by its own first temporal derivative); (3) observers may capitalize on non-τ variables. Hypotheses (2) and (3) imply specific patterns of errors. We presented animated, impending collisions between a moving object and a stationar…

The big picture: effects of surround on immersion and size perception.

2014

Despite the fear of the entertainment industry that illegal downloads of films might ruin their business, going to the movies continues to be a popular leisure activity. One reason why people prefer to watch movies in cinemas may be the surround of the movie screen or its physically huge size. To disentangle the factors that might contribute to the size impression, we tested several measures of subjective size and immersion in different viewing environments. For this purpose we built a model cinema that provided visual angle information comparable with that of a real cinema. Subjects watched identical movie clips in a real cinema, a model cinema, and on a display monitor in isolation. Wher…

Wall patterns influence the perception of interior space

2019

The texture of an object’s surface influences its perceived spatial extent. For example, Hermann von Helmholtz reported that a square patch with black and white stripes appears elongated perpendicular to the stripes’ orientation. This time-honoured finding stands in contrast with more recent recommendations by interior-design experts who suggest that stripe wall patterns make rooms appear elongated in the direction parallel to the stripes’ orientation. In a series of four experiments, we presented stripe wall patterns and varied the orientation of the stripes (horizontal vs. vertical) and their density (number of stripes per degree of visual angle). Subjects estimated the width and height …

Intra-visual conflict in visually induced motion sickness

2011

Abstract Motion sickness (MS) can be a debilitating side-effect not just of sea travel, but also when immersed in video games or virtual environments (visually induced MS). To explore the impact of visual display parameters on motion sickness, we presented footage taken on an automobile race track to different groups of observers during three experiments. In Experiment 1, one group watched the movie wearing a head-mounted display (HMD) and a second group looked at a large projection screen with unrestricted view. Resolution and visual angle were equated. In contrast to common assumption, the projection screen produced significantly higher motion sickness scores than the HMD. To understand t…

The Mona Lisa effect: Neural correlates of centered and off-centered gaze

2014

The Mona Lisa effect describes the phenomenon when the eyes of a portrait appear to look at the observer regardless of the observer's position. Recently, the metaphor of a cone of gaze has been proposed to describe the range of gaze directions within which a person feels looked at. The width of the gaze cone is about five degrees of visual angle to either side of a given gaze direction. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how the brain regions involved in gaze direction discrimination would differ between centered and decentered presentation positions of a portrait exhibiting eye contact. Subjects observed a given portrait's eyes. By presenting portraits with varyin…

Convex rear view mirrors compromise distance and time-to-contact judgements

2007

Convex rear view mirrors increasingly replace planar mirrors in automobiles. While increasing the field of view, convex mirrors are also taken to increase distance estimates and thereby reduce safety margins. However, this study failed to replicate systematic distance estimation errors in a real world setting. Whereas distance estimates were accurate on average, convex mirrors lead to significantly more variance in distance and spacing estimations. A second experiment explored the effect of mirrors on time-to-contact estimations, which had not been previously researched. Potential effects of display size were separated from effects caused by distortion in convex mirrors. Time-to-contact est…

Age-related differences in a delayed pointing of a M�ller-Lyer illusion

2003

It has been suggested that movements to visible or remembered targets are differently sensitive to the Müller-Lyer (ML) illusion. Indeed, when the target is continuously visible, movements rely on the veridical object characteristics, whereas remembered movements are thought to reflect the perceived characteristics of the object. The aim of the present study was to determine how movements to visible or remembered targets are influenced by the ML illusion in children aged 7 to 11 years old. Participants were asked to make a perceptual judgment or to point a shaft extremity of the ML configurations (Closed, Control, and Open) in three visual conditions (Closed Loop, Open Loop-0-s delay, and 5…

2016

Processing natural scenes requires the visual system to integrate local features into global object descriptions. To achieve coherent representations, the human brain uses statistical dependencies to guide weighting of local feature conjunctions. Pairwise interactions among feature detectors in early visual areas may form the early substrate of these local feature bindings. To investigate local interaction structures in visual cortex, we combined psychophysical experiments with computational modeling and natural scene analysis. We first measured contrast thresholds for 2x2 grating patch arrangements (plaids), which differed in spatial frequency composition (low, high or mixed), number of gr…