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S Shimojo

Publications and source records attributed to S Shimojo.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
PubMed1990

Real world occlusion constraints and binocular rivalry.

A surface occluding a more distant surface gives rise to interocularly unpaired regions to its immediate left and right. The unpaired region on the left side is visible only to the left eye, whereas that on the right side is visible only to the right eye. Thus for real world scenes there are opto-geometrical constraints which determine whether particular combinations of relative depth and right-eye-only or left-eye-only stimuli are ecologically valid or invalid. We report a demonstration and experiments to show that opto-geometrically "valid" unpaired regions are seen as continuous with the rear plane and escape interocular suppression, whereas "invalid" unpaired regions are perceived as closer and are suppressed vigorously. An additional experiment indicates that the results cannot be understood in terms of correspondence solving, but require neural mechanisms that embody real-world occlusion constraints. These results suggest a rather close interaction between stereopsis and rivalry "modules". Since explicit eye-of-origin information is lost relatively early in the hierarchical organization of cortical visual processing, we argue that occlusion-related constraints must be embodied at such early levels.

Chi-Square Distribution↗
PubMed1990

da Vinci stereopsis: depth and subjective occluding contours from unpaired image points.

Distant surfaces are occluded by nearer surfaces to different extents in the two eyes, leading to the existence of unpaired image points visible in one eye and not the other. An ecological analysis of the real world situation that could have given rise to such unpaired points indicates the presence of a depth constraint zone, defined by visibility lines between which possible real world points must lie. The leading edge of this zone starts at the edge of a fused binocular occluding surface and recedes linearly with increases in horizontal distance to the unpaired point. Psychophysical evidence indicates that the human visual system makes use of this unpaired information in a remarkably adaptive manner, showing an increase in perceived depth for increasing horizontal separations between the unpaired target and fused edge, at least over a significant angular range (approx. 25-40 min arc). We also show that unpaired points in binocular images can lead to the formation of subjective occluding contours and surface having the qualitatively appropriate sign of depth. Furthermore, we show that the visual system could not recover depth of unpaired points camouflaged from the other eye against silhouettes. Our findings indicate that the visual system makes use of occlusive relations in the real world to recover depth, contour, and surface from unpaired points. The fact that such processes must utilize eye-of-origin information implies that they share this essential characteristic with classical or Wheatstone stereopsis. The necessity of eye-of-origin information also suggests that the processing may begin relatively early in cortical visual processing, possibly as early as V1. Finally, the novel emergence of subjective occluding contours from unpaired monocular stimuli raises the possibility that this process is mediated by visual experience, built up by the association of unpaired points and occluding contours.

Depth Perception↗
PubMed1990

Amodal representation of occluded surfaces: role of invisible stimuli in apparent motion correspondence.

A series of demonstrations were created where the perceived depth of targets was controlled by stereoscopic disparity. A closer object (a cloud) was made to jump back and forth horizontally, partially occluding a farther object (a full moon). The more distant moon appeared stationary even though the unoccluded portion of it, a crescent, changed position. Reversal of the relative depth of the moon and cloud gave a totally different percept: the crescent appeared to flip back and forth in the front depth plane. Thus, the otherwise-robust apparent motion of the moon crescents was completely abolished in the cloud-closer case alone. This motion-blocking effect is attributed to the 'amodal presence' of the occluded surface continuing behind the occluding surface. To measure the effect of this occluded 'invisible' surface quantitatively, a bistable apparent motion display was used (Ramachandran and Anstis 1983a): two small rectangular-shaped targets changed their positions back and forth between two frames, and the disparity of a large centrally positioned rectangle was varied. When the perceived depths supported the possibility of amodal completion behind the large rectangle, increased vertical motion of the targets was found, suggesting that the amodal presence of the targets behind the occluder had effectively changed the center position of the moving targets for purposes of motion correspondence. Amodal contours are literally 'invisible', yet it is hypothesized that they have a neural representation at sufficiently early stages of visual processing to alter the correspondence solving process for apparent motion.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

Transparency: relation to depth, subjective contours, luminance, and neon color spreading.

The perception of transparency is highly dependent on luminance and perceived depth. An image region is seen as transparent if it is of intermediate luminance relative to adjacent image regions, and if it is perceived in front of another region and has a boundary which provides information that an object is visible through this region. Yet, transparency is not just the passive end-product of these required conditions. If perceived transparency is triggered, a number of seemingly more elemental perceptual primitives such as color, contour, and depth can be radically altered. Thus, with the perception of transparency, neon color spreading becomes apparent, depth changes, stereoscopic depth capture can be eliminated, and otherwise robust subjective contours can be abolished. In addition, we show that transparency is not coupled strongly to real-world chromatic constraints since combinations of luminance and color which would be unlikely to arise in real-world scenes still give rise to the perception of transparency. Rather than seeing transparency as a perceptual end-point, determined by seemingly more primitive processes, we interpret perceived transparency as much a 'cause', as an 'effect'. We speculate that the anatomical substrate for such mutual interaction may lie in cortical feed-forward connections which maintain modular segregation and cortical feedback connections which do not.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Intuitive reasoning about probability: theoretical and experimental analyses of the "problem of three prisoners".

Among various Bayesian problems of probability, the "problem of three prisoners" (Lindley, 1971; Mosteller, 1965) is an especially good example which illustrates the drastic discrepancy between intuitive reasoning and mathematical formal reasoning about probability. In particular, it raises intriguing questions concerning the mathematical and cognitive relevance of factors such as prior probabilities and the context in which certain information is given. In the current paper, we report a new version of the problem which turned out to be even more counterintuitive. This new version was also designed so that different inferential schemes would lead to separate estimates of posterior probability. The data obtained from questionnaires and theoretical analyses of the original and modified problems suggest that: (1) The psychological processes of intuitive reasoning are qualitatively different from mathematical reasoning. (2) The tendency to neglect prior probabilities (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, 1982) is not always the critical factor for illusory judgments. (3) Intuitive judgments can be categorized by several, distinctive propositional beliefs from which the judgments are apparently derived. We call these prototypical, crude beliefs "subjective theorems," and discuss their nature and roles in the current paper.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Occlusion and the solution to the aperture problem for motion.

The "aperture problem" indicates that a local reading of the velocity of an oriented contour is inherently ambiguous, insufficient by itself to recover the velocity of image points. In Wallach's "barber pole" display consisting of moving diagonal lines within an elongated rectangular aperture, it has been suggested that the unambiguous motion of edge-terminators along the longer edges of the aperture propagates towards the motion-ambiguous center part of drifting stripes. This results in the perception of a surface moving in the direction of the longer axis of the aperture. By manipulating the stereoscopic disparity of a striped pattern relative to the aperture plane, we found that the disambiguating effects of terminators could be abolished if the striped pattern was in uncrossed disparity relative to the aperture plane. Also, the motion in 3 separate horizontally oriented, and vertically aligned apertures which would otherwise be seen as moving horizontally, was seen as "linked" together and moving vertically. This occurred only when the horizontally oriented segments separating these apertures were stereoscopically coded so that they appeared as occluders in front. These findings suggest that accidental or "extrinsic" terminators created by occluding edges are treated differently from real or "intrinsic" terminators, and that the real-world constraint of occlusion is thus implemented in the ambiguity-solving processes for motion.

Depth Perception↗
PubMed1989

Subjective contours, tilt aftereffects, and visual cortical organization.

The tilt aftereffect (TAE) was used to study interactions between real and subjective contours. Subjects adapted to either real or illusory lines and were then shown test stimuli containing real or illusory lines. In our first experiment, we found that there is a marked asymmetry in the interactions between real and subjective stimuli. Adaptation to real lines produces comparable TAEs with real and subjective test lines. With either type of test stimulus the maximum effect occurs with a 10-20 deg difference between the orientations of the adaptation and test stimuli. Also, there is a strong TAE when the adaptation and test stimuli contain only subjective lines. However, there is a significantly weaker TAE when the adaptation stimulus is subjective and the test stimulus is real. In a second experiment we find that interocular transfer of tilt aftereffects is greater when the test stimulus is subjective than when it is real. These results are consistent with physiological reports that a subset of orientation selective cells in visual cortex is responsive to subjective contours and that these cells are more binocular, on average, than those responsive only to real contours. Our findings also suggest that the perception of subjective contours is based on the activation of neurons with properties, such as orientation selectivity, which are characteristic of early visual cortical areas.

Adaptation, Ocular↗
PubMed1989

Stereoscopic depth: its relation to image segmentation, grouping, and the recognition of occluded objects.

Image regions corresponding to partially hidden objects are enclosed by two types of bounding contour: those inherent to the object itself (intrinsic) and those defined by occlusion (extrinsic). Intrinsic contours provide useful information regarding object shape, whereas extrinsic contours vary arbitrarily depending on accidental spatial relationships in scenes. Because extrinsic contours can only degrade the process of surface description and object recognition, it is argued that they must be removed prior to a stage of template matching. This implies that the two types of contour must be distinguished relatively early in visual processing and we hypothesize that the encoding of depth is critical for this task. The common border is attached to and regarded as intrinsic to the closer region, and detached from and regarded as extrinsic to the farther region. We also suggest that intrinsic borders aid in the segmentation of image regions and thus prevent grouping, whereas extrinsic borders provide a linkage to other extrinsic borders and facilitate grouping. Support for these views is found in a series of demonstrations, and also in an experiment where the expected superiority of recognition was found when partially sampled faces were seen in a back rather than a front stereoscopic depth plane.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Mirror reversal by blind subjects in cutaneous perception and motor production of letters and numbers.

A letter drawn on the forehead is often perceived as its mirror reversal. Similarly, people produce mirror reversals when asked to write a letter on the underside of a table at which they are sitting. We varied the orientation and position of the stimulated or inscribed surface, and found several examples of these two mirror-reversal phenomena in blind subjects (who had no, or very little, visual experience), as well as in sighted subjects. Furthermore, the mirror-reversal rate of the two groups of subjects as a function of orientation and position of the surface was highly correlated. Thus, the mirror-reversal phenomena should be attributed to a nonvisual, spatial cognitive scheme that is perhaps shared by sighted and blind subjects.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

An occlusion-related mechanism of depth perception based on motion and interocular sequence.

Objects occlude other objects in natural scenes, and this occlusive relationship increases the spatio-temporal complexity of sensory inputs to the two eyes, especially when objects are moving. We ask whether the visual system can employ clever strategies which make use of real-world constraints on inputs to the eyes to determine the depth of objects. Employing psychophysical methods, we found that occlusion-related geometric rules, which constrain the relationship between the direction of motion and the order and asynchrony of eyes, are implemented at early stages of cortical visual processing.

Depth Perception↗
PubMed1988

[Xenon CT CBF mapping derived from two minutes inhalation].

Although xenon enhanced CT method for local cerebral blood flow measurement has been brought into a clinical practice, the technique has inherent limitations including anesthetic effects and expensive cost of xenon by a large consumption. To overcome these problems a modified method with a short-duration inhalation was developed and its validity was attested. Siemens Somatom SF with a resolution of 256 X 256 pixels and a scan time of 10 seconds was used. The subjects inhaled 50% Xe/O2 gas mixture from an apparatus consisted of Douglas bag and an open circuit. Xenon concentration in the expired gas was continuously monitored and estimated for arterial blood concentration by using a hematocrit correction. PaCO2 was monitored throughout the study. At the starting point and the endpoint of the inhalation two scans were performed respectively. Thus obtained four images were processed for CT noise cancellation, summation and subtraction to produce an in vivo autoradiography image. Local CBF was calculated from equations derived from the autoradiographic technique with a fixed partition coefficient of lambda = 1. Computer simulation studies were performed to find the optimal scan point to obtain an autoradiographic image and to estimate the calculation errors of this method. One minute and forty-five seconds was found to be the optimal scan point to gain an autoradiographic image in view of a balance between linearity of CBF/enhancement curve and total amount of tissue enhancement. The theoretical errors due to the assumption for a fixed partition coefficient were calculated to be 8% underestimation for gray matter and 5% overestimation for white matter.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Administration, Inhalation↗
PubMed1987

Vernier acuity is less than grating acuity in 2- and 3-month-olds.

Vernier acuity and grating acuity were measured longitudinally starting at 1 or 2 months of age in 22 infants, using a two-alternative, forced-choice preferential looking technique. For vernier acuity, the motion-sound display was employed. For grating acuity, a preferential looking method was employed. Steps of the stimulus (vernier offset and spatial frequency of the grating) and procedures were basically identical between the two acuity tests. The range of stimuli was set so as to compare the two acuities at younger ages. Results show: vernier acuity is less than grating acuity at 11-12 weeks of age or younger, and the developmental rate of vernier acuity is greater than that of grating acuity in the first half-year of life. To interpret the data, it was speculated that: the mean sampling distance (center-to-center distance between receptive fields) may influence vernier acuity more than grating acuity, whereas the size of the receptive field may influence grating acuity more than vernier acuity: when the mean sampling distance is large relative to the size of the receptive field, vernier acuity may be less than grating acuity. Thus, the neonatal visual system, just as the visual system in the periphery and in strabismic amblyopia, may be characterized by spatial undersampling.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1987

Perceived spatial organization of cutaneous patterns on surfaces of the human body in various positions.

The perceived spatial organization of cutaneous patterns was examined in three experiments. People identified letters or numbers traced on surfaces of their body when the relative spatial orientations and positions of the body surfaces and of the stimuli were varied. Stimuli on the front or back of the head were perceived with respect to a frame of reference positioned behind those surfaces, independent of the surfaces' position and orientation. This independence may relate to the way in which the sensory apparatus on the front of the head is used in planning action. Stimuli on other surfaces of the head and body were perceived in relation to the position and orientation of the surface with respect to the whole body or trunk (most of which was usually upright). Stimuli on all transverse/horizontal surfaces were perceived with respect to frames of reference associated with the head/upper chest area. These frames were also used for stimuli on frontoparallel surfaces in front of the upper body. These observations may result from the use of "central" frames of reference that are independent of the head and are associated with the upper body. Stimuli on surfaces in other positions and orientations (with two exceptions) were perceived "externally"--that is, in frames of reference directly facing the stimulated surface. The spatial information processing we found may be fairly general because several of our main findings were also observed in very young children and blind adults and in paradigms studying perception by "active touch" and the spatial organization of the motor production of patterns.

Humans↗
PubMed1987

Attention-dependent visual capture in double vision.

When the visual image of a body part, such as a finger, is doubled by a prism, the 'felt' position of that body part is captured by one of its visual images. Moving eye fixation from one to the other visual image is accompanied by a quick shift of the felt position. When focal attention is dissociated from foveation, the former determines visual capture. These new observations underline an active role of focal attention in intersensory integration and sensory-motor coordination of body parts.

Attention↗