Manipulating the shape of distance effects in visual curve tracing: further evidence for the zoom lens model.
The time required to determine that two dots occur on the same curve in a visual display increases with increasing interdot curve distance. McCormick and Jolicoeur (1991) presented a model of visual curve tracing in which a local operator with a variable size receptive field tracks the curve segment intervening the two dots. In this model, human response time can be predicted by counting the number of shifts of the receptive field needed to trace the curve segment. The present study re-examined the predictive power of the zoom lens curve tracing model by selectively manipulating distractor proximity in four conditions and regressing the predictions of the model on human response time. The model was compared with two other curve tracing models, pixel by pixel tracing, and Jolicoeur, Ullman and MacKay's (1991) bipartite receptive field operator. The results provided strong support for McCormick and Jolicoeur's (1991) visual attention based zoom lens operator.
McCormick
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Department of Psychology, St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada.
Jolicoeur
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P
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004215:Distance Perception; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time