PubMed HealthSearch

PubMed · 1771777

Spatial-interval discrimination in two-dimensions.

Abstract

This study is concerned with the precision of spatial-interval discrimination when the stimulus is varied in two-dimensions rather than one-dimension. For the two-dimensional task, observers were required to judge the centrality of a dot within a circle. Similar measurements were made in a one-dimensional task, i.e. the test dot was displaced only along one meridian, and the results were compared. This study shows that thresholds for the two-dimensional task are approx. square root of 2 times the threshold of the one-dimensional task when the observer's task is to simply detect an offset in both one- and two-dimensional conditions. However, thresholds are about a factor of two higher for the two-dimensional task if the observer is required to label the direction of offset.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

B C Jiang, D M Levi. 1991. Spatial-interval discrimination in two-dimensions.. https://doi.org/10.1016/0042-6989(91)90188-b

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related citations

Human tactile discrimination of curvature when contact area with the skin remains constant.

A forced choice paradigm was used to measure the capacity of human subjects to discriminate the curvature of stimuli applied passively to the skin of an immobilized finger. The stimuli consisted of spherically curved segments with a base radius of 2.5 mm; thus the area of contact with the fingerpad skin was approximately 19.6 mm2 for all stimuli. There were 2 series of experiments. In series 1, the standard surface had a curvature of 286 m-1 (radius of curvature 3.5 mm); subjects were able to discriminate an increase in curvature of about 13%. In series 2, the standard had a curvature of 154 m-1 (radius 6.5 mm); subjects were able to discriminate an increase in curvature of about 18%. Thus, even when the contact area between the surface and the skin was invariant, humans were able to discriminate small changes in curvature using only information from the cutaneous receptors.

Discrimination, Psychological

Segregation of mesh-derived textures evaluated by resistance to added disorder.

In the "figure detection task" the strength of segregation for a particular texture pair was estimated by the threshold amount of added disorder that prevented segregation of a textured figure from a textured ground. Disorder was either jitter in the orientation of the texture elements, or jitter in their xy positions, or a mixture of the two. Other procedures included lowpass filtering, and a task requiring discrimination between textured figures of different shapes. Orientation cues are weakly or inconsistently used for segregating mesh textures. The low spatial harmonics are very important. A new finding is that orientation and position jitter thresholds for a set of figure/ground texture patterns are often proportional. In a mixture the one disorder can be exchanged for the other.

Discrimination, Psychological