An empirical explanation of the speed-distance effect

William T. Wojtach, Kyongje Sung, Dale Purves

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Understanding motion perception continues to be the subject of much debate, a central challenge being to account for why the speeds and directions seen accord with neither the physical movements of objects nor their projected movements on the retina. Here we investigate the varied perceptions of speed that occur when stimuli moving across the retina traverse different projected distances (the speed-distance effect). By analyzing a database of moving objects projected onto an image plane we show that this phenomenology can be quantitatively accounted for by the frequency of occurrence of image speeds generated by perspective transformation. These results indicate that speed-distance effects are determined empirically from accumulated past experience with the relationship between image speeds and moving objects.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere6771
JournalPloS one
Volume4
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 26 2009
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General

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