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Ambiguity in high definition: Gaze determines physical interpretation of ambiguous rotation even in the absence of a visual context

Yes / Physical interactions between objects, or between an object and the ground, are amongst the most biologically relevant for live beings. Prior knowledge of Newtonian physics may play a role in disambiguating an object’s movement as well as foveation by increasing the spatial resolution of the visual input. Observers were shown a virtual 3D scene, representing an ambiguously rotating ball translating on the ground. The ball was perceived as rotating congruently with friction, but only when gaze was located at the point of contact. Inverting or even removing the visual context had little influence on congruent judgements compared with the effect of gaze. Counterintuitively, gaze at the point of contact determines the solution of perceptual ambiguity, but independently of visual context. We suggest this constitutes a frugal strategy, by which the brain infers dynamics locally when faced with a foveated input that is ambiguous. / J.S. was funded by a College of Life Sciences studentship from the University of Leicester.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/17988
Date09 August 2020
CreatorsSouto, D., Smith, L., Sudkamp, J., Bloj, Marina
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, Published version
Rights©The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/., CC-BY

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