The effect of object familiarity on the perception of motion

MARTÍN, ANDRÉS; CHAMBEAUD, J. G.; BARRAZA, JOSÉ F.

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-HUMAN PERCEPTION AND PERFORMANCE

AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC

Lugar: Washington DC, (USA); Año: 2015 vol. 41 p. 283 - 288

0096-1523

Humans are capable of picking up the invariance of objects´s physical speed regardless of the distance from which they are seen. This ability is known as speed constancy. This problem was studied for many years and we still have many unsolved questions about how the visual system combines the information that serves to the estimation of speed. Typically, these studies focused on the spatiotemporal cues present in the stimulus. We present a series of experiments that introduces the object´s familiarity in combination with other cues to study the speed constancy. The results of the first experiment show that human observers use the familiarity in the estimation of the physical speed of the objects. In the second experiment, we show that the familiarity helps the system in achieving speed constancy. In the third experiment we remove the contextual cues, and show the effect of familiarity on speed constancy. Finally, we propose that familiarity must be included in the analysis of speed constancy, perhaps, by considering the prototypical size of the objects.