Continuously alternating backgrounds induce dynamic tilt illusions.

Human perception is highly susceptible to environmental influences, as shown in Figures 1a and 1b, the same vertical grating, surrounded by a left-facing or right-facing background grating, and is tilted in the opposite direction towards the background grating.
this tilt illusion is usually thought to be due to the primary visual cortex, side-suppression toward sitcoms between specific neurons: neurons that prefer the orientation of the background grating suppress other neurons to this orientation, making the neurons that prefer the central grating facing more inhibited in the same direction as the background grating, causing the human perception of the central grating orientation to be biased in the opposite direction to the background grating.
However, the environment cannot always be static.
if the opposite background grating alternates continuously (according to the brightness change function in Figure 1d), will the vertical grating be perceived as a one-sided right by the effect of side suppression, and one to the left, as if the pendulum were swinging (the light sway)? Through four experiments, Jiang Yi, a research team at the National Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found for the first time that when the background alternates continuously, observers do experience this dynamic illusion and name it dynamic tilt illusion.
Experiment 1 manipulated the rate of background grating alternating (0.6-10Hz), and found that, as the background grating alternate speed increased, the amount of perceived illusion decreased gradually, approaching the minimum value from approximately 6Hz, whether on a red-green background or a gray background (Figure 2).
Experiment 2 adds a control condition that does not trigger the tilt illusion (Figure 1c), and it turns out that the control condition also does not trigger a dynamic tilt illusion.
experiment 3 required the subject to manually adjust a real-shaking grating to match the perceived illusion size, and found that the angle of the dynamic tilt illusion adjusted by the subject was very close to the angle of the tilt illusion of the existing study.
experiment 4 manipulates the spatial spacing between the background grating and the central grating, and it is found that when the two are from no-interval to 1 degree, the dynamic tilt illusion is significantly reduced, which is basically consistent with the results of the tilt illusion.
the study shows that the continuous change of background orientation leads to a continuous change in the direction of side suppression, so that the human perception of the central grating direction also changes, which is reflected in the illusion of dynamic tilt. more
more importantly, the results show that when the brain processes dynamic information, it organizes continuous visual orientation information into a sensory unit in time, and as the rate of change towards information increases, more and more information loses its independence as it is integrated into the same sensory unit, so the observed dynamic tilt illusion gradually weakens.
simply, when it comes to dynamic information, the sampling rate of human cognitive processing is not sufficient to enable them to track all the changes in the physical world.
research work has been jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences "First Action" co-funded postdoctoral project, the Chinese Academy of Sciences frontier science key research program and the Chinese Academy of Sciences strategic pilot science and technology special fund, the relevant research results published online in Journal of Vision.
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