Prolonged weightlessness, reference frames and visual symmetry detection.
We evaluated the influence of prolonged weightlessness on the performance of three cosmonauts to bilateral symmetry detection in the course of a 15-day-long Russian-French mission CASSIOPEE 96 aboard the MIR station. We tested the influence of weightlessness on subjects' performance as a function of the retinal orientation of axis of symmetry. as a function of type of stimuli (closed versus multi-elements shapes) and as a function of visual field presentation (at fixation, left visual field. right visual field). The results indicate firstly a difference between presentation at fixation versus away of fixation. Away of fixation, no effect of microgravity on performance was shown. A hypothesis of hemispheric specialization for symmetry detection was not supported as well. At fixation, an effect of micro-gravity was shown and more interestingly, the effect was quite different as a function of type of shapes used. suggesting that symmetry detection is a multiple-stage process.
Leone
G
G
Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Perception et de l'Action, CNRS-College de France, Paris. gle@ccr.jussieu.fr
de Schonen
S
S
Lipshits
M
M
D000337:Aerospace Medicine; D006804:Ergonomics; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D013026:Space Flight; D014794:Visual Fields / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D014893:Weightlessness