Poor peripheral binding depends in part on stimulus color

Abstract

We have compared two explanations for poor peripheral binding. Binding is the ability to assign the correct features (e.g., color, direction of motion, orientation) to objects. Wu, Kanai, and Shimojo (Nature, 429(6989), 262, 2004) showed that subjects performed poorly on binding dot color with direction of motion in the periphery. Suzuki, Wolfe, Horowitz, and Noguchi (Vision Research, 82, 58-65, 2013) similarly showed that subjects had trouble binding color with line orientation in the periphery. These authors concluded that performance in the periphery was poor because binding is poor in the periphery. However, both studies used red and green stimuli. We tested an alternative hypothesis, that poor peripheral binding is in part due to poor peripheral red/green color vision. Eccentricity-dependent changes in visual processing cause peripheral red/green vision to be worse than foveal vision. In contrast, blue/yellow vision remains centrifugally more stable. We tested 9 subjects in a replication and extension of Suzuki and colleagues' line orientation judgment, in red and green, and in blue and yellow. There were three central conditions: (1) red (or blue) all horizontal, green (or yellow) all vertical; (2) red (or blue) all vertical, green (or yellow) all horizontal; or (3) random pairing of color and orientation. In both the red/green and the blue/yellow color schemes, peripheral performance was influenced by central line orientation, replicating Suzuki and colleagues. However, the effect with blue/yellow lines was smaller, indicating that poor peripheral "binding," as hypothesized by both Wu and colleagues and Suzuki and colleagues, is due in part to their use of red and green stimuli.

The Distinctness of Illusory and Non-Illusory Conjunctions in the Perception of Chinese Words: Assessing the Roles of Stimulus Exposure Time

“…Our two experimental results were consistent in finding typical IC phenomena under IC stimulation conditions, suggesting that IC was real in Chinese words, which was consistent with existing findings on IC for English letters (Botella et al, 2017; Chen & Watanabe, 2020; Gunther & McKinney, 2020), English words (Prinzmetal et al, 1995; Reicher, 1969), and Chinese strokes (Deng & Zhang, 2020; Fang & Wu, 1989). These findings suggest that each Chinese character in Chinese words has the properties of separability and re-combinability.…”

“…Most recent investigators have explained the IC phenomenon in terms of the core assumptions of FIT (Botella et al, 2017;Ceja & Franconeri, 2018;Gunther & McKinney, 2020;Wolfe & Horowitz, 2017). However, some scholars deny the existence of a free-floating feature of the stimuli, arguing that participants' random guesses about the stimuli and misclassifications of the target stimuli could lead to IClike misconnections (Botella et al, 2001(Botella et al, , 2017Ivry & Prinzmetal, 1991).…”