Visual space under free viewing conditions.

Abstract

Most research on visual space has been done under restricted viewing conditions and in reduced environments. In our experiments, observers performed an exocentric pointing task, a collinearity task, and a parallelity task in a entirely visible room. We varied the relative distances between the objects and the observer and the separation angle between the two objects. We were able to compare our data directly with data from experiments in an environment with less monocular depth information present. We expected that in a richer environment and under less restrictive viewing conditions, the settings would deviate less from the veridical settings. However, large systematic deviations from veridical settings were found for all three tasks. The structure of these deviations was task dependent, and the structure and the deviations themselves were comparable to those obtained under more restricted circumstances. Thus, the additional information was not used effectively by the observers.