title: Detection of symmetry and anti-symmetry.
abstract: To assess the role of second-order channels in symmetry perception we measured the effects of check size, spatial frequency content, eccentricity and grey scale range on the detection of symmetrical and anti-symmetrical patterns. Thresholds for symmetrical stimuli were only moderately affected by these manipulations. Anti-symmetrical stimuli composed of large black and white checks elicited low thresholds. However, anti-symmetry became essentially undetectable at small check sizes. Removing low frequencies from large-check-size, anti-symmetrical stimuli had little effect on thresholds whereas removing high frequencies had a pronounced effect. Moving the stimuli from fixation to 8 degrees eccentricity caused a dramatic increase in thresholds for anti-symmetrical stimuli but not symmetrical stimuli. When the grey scale range was increased anti-symmetry was undetectable at any check size whereas symmetry was easily seen at all. We argue that these results and others in the literature suggest that anti-symmetry is only detected under conditions favourable to selective attention.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montréal, Qué., Canada.
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mancini
authors.forename: Sharon L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Sally
authors.forename: Rick
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Gurnsey
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011601:Psychophysics; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D015348:Vision, Binocular; D014792:Visual Acuity