Chinese and Americans see opposite apparent motions in a Chinese character.
The perceived direction of apparent motion can be influenced by both "top-down" factors, such as expectation, and by "bottom-up" or stimulus-driven factors, such as grouping (Tse, P., Cavanagh, P. & Nakayama, K. (1998). The role of parsing in high-level motion processing. In T. Watanabe, High-level motion processing - computational, neurobiological and psychophysical perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Here we report the results of a single experiment that pitted top-down cues against bottom-up cues in an apparent motion sequence over the successive strokes of a Chinese character. Although each stroke was in fact presented all at once, subjects raised in China tended to see apparent motion over a single stroke in the direction it would have taken when drawn by hand, even though bottom-up cues drive a percept of apparent motion in the opposite direction for observers unfamiliar with the Chinese language. There is therefore a learned component to motion perception arising from top-down expectations capable of overriding bottom-up cues to motion.
Tse
P U
PU
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, 38 Spemannstrasse, 72076, Tuebingen, Germany. tse@mpivision.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de
Cavanagh
P
P
D000328:Adult; D002681:China / Q000208:ethnology; D003071:Cognition; D005006:Ethnicity / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D014796:Visual Perception; D014956:Writing