In recent research of culture and ethnicity in visual perception, some researchers have found support for the hypothesis that more collectivistic cultures tend to be more influenced by surrounding contextual visual information than more individualistic cultures. This hypothesis suggests that even low-level visual perception may not be universal and has great implications on how vision research should be conducted. The current study reexamines this hypothesis in the rod and frame task, which tests the influence of a tilted contextual frame on orientation perception of the rod. We found no difference between participants of East Asian and Western European descent in this task. Despite not finding the cultural effect, we found a well-reported gender effect in which women were more influenced by the tilt of the frame than men, helping to ensure the quality of the data collected. Our results suggest that contextual influence on visual perception does not affect East Asians and white Western Europeans differently.

Motion opponency, first observed within the primate middle temporal cortex (MT), refers to the suppressing effect of opposite motion directions on neuronal activity. Namely, when opposing motion directional signals stimulate an MT neuron's receptive field, this neuron's response is comparable with that induced by flicker noise. Under such suppression, it is unknown whether any directional information is still represented at MT. In this study, we applied support vector machine (SVM) learning to human functional magnetic resonance imaging data to investigate if any motion defined orientation information was still available from suppressed MT. We found that, at least at the level of AE45 discrimination, such orientation information was still available. Interestingly, after behavioural perceptual learning that improved human discrimination of fine orientation discrimination (e.g. 42 vs. 48 ) using the MT-suppressive motion stimuli, the SVM discrimination of AE45 worsened when functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals at post-learning MT were used. This result is consistent with findings in Thompson et al. (2013) that, post-perceptual learning, MT suppression was not released, suggesting that motion opponency was perhaps functionally too important for perceptual learning to overcome.