This paper is freely available online:
Svarverud, E., Gilson, S.J. and Glennerster, A., (2012)
A demonstration of 'broken' visual space.
PLoS ONE, 7(3), e33782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033782
There are press releases about this paper on the PLoS, Wellcome Trust and University of Reading websites.
Abstract
It has long been assumed that there is a distorted mapping between real
and 'perceived' space, based on demonstrations of systematic errors in
judgements of slant, curvature, direction and separation. Here, we have
applied a direct test to the notion of a coherent visual space. In an
immersive virtual environment, participants judged the relative distance
of two squares displayed in separate intervals. On some trials, the
virtual scene expanded by a factor of four between intervals although,
in line with recent results, participants did not report any noticeable
change in the scene. We found that there was no consistent depth
ordering of objects that can explain the distance matches participants
made in this environment (e.g. A > B > D yet also A < C < D)
and hence no single one-to-one mapping between participants' perceived
space and any real 3D environment. Instead, factors that affect pairwise
comparisons of distances dictate participants' performance. These data
contradict, more directly than previous experiments, the idea that the
visual system builds and uses a coherent internal 3D representation of a
scene.
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