An advantage for horizontal motion direction discrimination

Abstract

Discrimination performance is better for cardinal motion directions than for oblique ones, a phenomenon known as the oblique effect. In a first experiment of this paper, we tested the oblique effect for coarse motion direction discrimination and compared performance for the two cardinal and two diagonal motion directions. Our results provide evidence for the oblique effect for coarse motion direction discrimination. Interestingly, the oblique effect was larger between horizontal and diagonal than between vertical and diagonal motion directions. In a second experiment, we assessed fine motion direction discrimination for horizontal and vertical motion. It has been suggested that differences in performance strongly depend on motion coherence. Therefore, we tested performance at predetermined motion coherences of 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% and 70%. Unsurprisingly, performance overall increased with increasing motion coherence and angular deviations between control and test stimulus. More importantly, however, we found an advantage for horizontal over vertical fine motion direction discrimination. Noteworthy is the large variability in performance across experimental conditions in both experiments, which highlights the importance of considering individual difference when assessing perceptual phenomena within large groups of naïve participants.

Keywords: Horizontal motion; Motion direction discrimination; Motion perception; Oblique effect.