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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Distance perception in the spiny mouse Acomys cahirinus: vertical jumping.

Acomys cahirinus, a precocial muroid, that has shown precise jumping in the natural habitat, did not jump from 25 cm in a laboratory situation. To investigate this further, A. cahirinus were observed jumping from platforms at two different heights, onto different sized checkered substrates and from a visual cliff. Adult animals discriminated between platforms that were 6.4 cm and 25.4 cm above the substrate and between small and large checkered patterns on the floor. Most adult animals and neonates jumped down on the shallow side of the visual cliff. Animals developed individual patterns of jumping over a series of trials, with some jumping often, some rarely, and others jumping only from the low platform. Good distance perception was indicated when they did not jump from heights, and by their making appropriate postural adjustment when they did jump from heights and landed without mishap. Different spacing of trials indicated that height was a more effective stimulus for animals which had all four conditions on the same day, while floor pattern was more effective for animals with each of the four conditions on a separate day.

Adult

Gender differences in apparent motion perception.

Distance disparity is a strong cue to element correspondence in apparent motion. Using a 2-AFC paradigm we have previously shown that shape similarity also plays a role. We now demonstrate a small gender difference in these effects: women are more sensitive to distance disparity, whereas men are more sensitive to differences in shape. Furthermore, in the competing presence of a shape cue, women's sensitivity to distance decreases while men's sensitivity is unaffected. These observations may be related to putative gender differences in the 'form' and 'motion-spatial relations' cortical pathways.

Adult

Scalar perceptions of distance in simple binocular configurations.

Under reduced viewing, a single visual object tends to appear about 2 m away. Gogel (1972) found that the far point in a binocular configuration of two points of light also tended to appear about 2 m away, while the near point was displaced toward the observer. Attempts to replicate this latter result with points of light, as well as with a large rectangle for the nearer object, proved generally successful. Under some conditions, however, the far point was perceived to be closer to the observer when seen with the near point than when seen alone or with the rectangle. This unexpected result suggests caution in assuming that the far object in such a configuration will always remain at a stable perceived distance.

Distance Perception

Perception of distance calls by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and zebra finches (Poephila guttata): assessing species-specific advantages.

Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and zebra finches (Poephila guttata) share a common functional class of vocalizations called distance calls. The perception of species-specific distance calls by both species was measured with a habituation-dishabituation operant paradigm. Changes in discrimination performance were noted as listening conditions were modified or stimulus properties were altered. Both species showed better performance for calls of their own species. For zebra finches this tendency increased slightly when a background noise was added to the testing environment. Shifting the frequency region of the calls affected the discrimination performance of male budgerigars but not females or zebra finches. Reversing the temporal order of the calls affected the perceptual advantage for conspecific vocalizations in zebra finches but not in budgerigars. These results highlight species differences in perceiving acoustic communication signals.

Animals

Determinants of personal space in young children: perception of distance cues.

Two methods of assessing personal space in young children were examined in a group of 24 boys and 24 girls, aged 3 to 6 yr. When sex of peer figures and affect attributed to them were varied, 3-yr.-olds made distance-cue judgements based on affect but failed to use affect cues in structuring personal space. However, 4- to 6-yr.-olds readily perceived and used distance to communicate the affective quality of peer relations. On both measures, perception of distance cues increased with age. Only girls also used sex of figures as a social cue in depicting appropriate distances.

Affect

Haptic perception of object distance in a single-strand vibratory web.

Can humans, like other animals, perceive distance by mechanical vibrations transmitted in a solid medium? In seven experiments, subjects perceived the distances from the hand of occluded metal disks attached to a taut nylon strand. Mechanical waves were initiated at the hand by the subject or at the disk by the experimenter. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perceived distance was linearly dependent on object distance with or without practice. The results of Experiments 3 and 4 revealed an inverse dependency of perceived distance on strand tension. In Experiment 5, a constant difference in perceived distance between vertical and horizontal strand manipulations was found. The results of Experiments 6 and 7 showed that distance was perceptible when the mechanical wave was not initiated by the subject. The informational basis for this haptic spatial ability was sought in the dynamics expressed by the one-dimensional wave equation, specifically, in the constants relating strand forces to strand motions.

Adult

Methadone maintenance: an assessment of potential fluctuations in behavior between doses.

Thirty methadone maintenance outpatients were measured 1 and 25 hours after ingestion of methadone on auditory threshold, distance perception, simple and differential reaction time, time perception, attention span, and short-term memory. The results revealed a small but statistically significant difference between the two tests for distance perception. In addition, treatment interacted with preparatory interval on differential reaction time and with sex on attention span.

Adolescent

Gravity as a monocular cue for perception of absolute distance and/or absolute size.

When the motion of an object is influenced by gravity (eg free fall, pendulum, wave motion), that influence may provide a cue to computing the absolute distance and/or size of the object. Formal analysis supports the claim that the distance and size of moving objects are generally computable with reference to the gravitational component of motion. Informal evidence from judgments of realism in films is consistent with this gravity-cue hypothesis.

Cues

Systematic distortions of shape from stereopsis.

The effectiveness of disparity information in defining 3-D shape was investigated by means of judgements of the shape of cylindrical continuous curved surfaces presented as random dot stereograms. At a close viewing distance, truly circular cylinders appeared elongated; at an intermediate distance, perception was close to veridical; and, at a far distance, cylinders appeared flattened. Indirect measures of scaling distance were calculated from these data. The results strongly suggest that the observed shape distortions are a consequence of scaling horizontal disparities with an incorrect measure of egocentric distance.

Depth Perception

Absolute and relative cues for the auditory perception of egocentric distance.

Three experiments were performed to examine the reverberation cue to egocentric auditory distance and to determine the extent to which such a cue could provide 'absolute', as contrasted with 'relative', information about distance. In experiment 1 independent groups of blindfolded observers (200 altogether) were presented with broadband noise from a speaker at one of five different distances (0.55 to 8 m) in a normal hard-walled room. Half of each group of observers were presented with the sound at 0 deg azimuth, followed (after a delay) by the identical sound at 90 deg azimuth. The order of presentation was reversed for the remaining observers. Perceived distance varied significantly as a function of the physical distance to the speaker, even for the first presentations. The change in the binaural information between the 0 deg and 90 deg presentations did not significantly modify the results. For both orientations, near distances were overestimated and far distances were underestimated. Experiment 2 and 3 were designed to evaluate how much prior auditory exposure to the laboratory environment was necessary. A 200 Hz square-wave signal was presented from one of three distances (1, 2, or 6 m) to observers who had either minimal room information or an exposure which included talking within the room. Perceived distance varied significantly with physical distance regardless to exposure condition.

Acoustic Stimulation

Pictorial and motion-based information for depth perception.

When computer-generated objects approached the viewpoint in midair, a large far object appeared to be nearer than a small near object and appeared to hit the viewpoint before the small object, which was specified by time-to-contact information to arrive sooner. These judgements were consistent with relative size and occurred even when motion-based information was potentially above threshold. The effects of relative size persisted with higher resolution animated films of approaching objects, were weakened by ground-intercept information, and were not as robust with laterally translating objects. Although it is often asserted that the kinds of information that have traditionally been called static depth cues are superseded by motion-based depth information, this article attempts to show that the reverse also can occur in distance perception, as has been shown in form perception.

Adult