Seeing properties of an invisible object: Feature inheritance and shine-through
- Creators
- Herzog, Michael H.
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Koch, Christof
Abstract
We characterize a class of spatio-temporal illusions with two complementary properties. Firstly, if a vernier stimulus is flashed for a short time on a monitor and is followed immediately by a grating, the latter can express features of the vernier, such as its offset, its orientation, or its motion (feature inheritance). Yet the vernier stimulus itself remains perceptually invisible. Secondly, the vernier can be rendered visible by presenting gratings with a larger number of elements (shine-through). Under these conditions, subjects perceive two independent " objects " each carrying their own features. Transition between these two domains can be effected by subtle changes in the spatio-temporal layout of the grating. This should allow psychophysicists and electrophysiologists to investigate feature binding in a precise and quantitative manner.
Additional Information
© 2001 by the National Academy of Sciences. Received March 15, 2000. Accepted January 30, 2001. Communicated by George Sperling, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, January 30, 2001 (received for review March 15, 2000). We thank Landi Parish for help in the experiments and Steffen Egner, Manfred Fahle, Gabriel Kreiman, and Geraint Rees for comments on the manuscript. Two anonymous referees provided very useful references. Mike Walsh's expertise was invaluable in providing the oscilloscopes. Anne Lilje helped maintain and fix the computers. We also thank all of our subjects, some of whom patiently spent a very long time in front of the screen. M.H. was supported by a fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and by the SFB 517 "Neurocognition" of the DFG. C.K. received funding from the Keck Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health, and the National Science Foundation. The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by page charge payment. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. §1734 solely to indicate this fact.Attached Files
Published - HERpnas01.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC31215
- Eprint ID
- 941
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:HERpnas01
- SFB-517 "Neurocognition"
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
- W. M. Keck Foundation
- National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
- NSF
- NIH
- Created
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2005-11-15Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Koch Laboratory (KLAB)