Simple rotary motion is integrated across fixations.
Participants were shown a line rotating at a constant angular velocity and were asked to judge whether motion was continuous or whether the line jumped (i.e., moved either forward or backward in the rotary cycle). In two experiments, the participants were significantly better than chance in detecting these jumps in simple rotary motion even when the jumps occurred during a saccade. Moreover, in Experiment 2, when the jump occurred during a saccade followed by a masking flash, perception of the jump was at least as good as when it occurred during a fixation followed by a masking flash. These results complement and extend the findings of Verfaillie and co-workers, who found that perceptions of some changes in biological motion were as good across fixations as when they occurred during a fixation. These findings are in contrast to the common finding, in the reading literature, that people are consciously "blind" to many changes in the text and to those, in the scene perception literature, in which detection of static changes across fixations is above chance but plausibly well below the level that would be expected if the change occurred during a fixation.
Pollatsek
Alexander
A
Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA. pollatsek@psych.umass.edu
Rayner
Keith
K
D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D009039:Motion Perception; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011897:Random Allocation; D012399:Rotation; D014796:Visual Perception