There is much that separates early visual processing from object perception and little firm knowledge of how the transition from one to the other is accomplished. The proposed experiments have as their principal focus two elementary components of objects, color and motion, with the aim of characterizing how the visual system combines them. The research will provide answers to questions specific to the processing of motion and color and will also contribute to a more general model of spatially modulated information integration in normal vision. The experiments will measure the contributions of luminance and chromatic stimulus components to the detection and perceived motion of simple 1- and 2-dimensional patterns as a function of the components' relative orientations, spatial frequencies, and phase. The experiments will test the hypothesis that the visual system does not processes information about space and color independently. The experiments will reveal whether and how the visual system varies its integration of luminance and chromatic motion signals in response to stimulus spatial properties. It is hypothesized that the rules governing the interaction of spatial and color information is constant across motion processing tasks and reflects processing constraints imposed by the properties of natural objects. The results of the studies are expected to contribute both specific examples and general rules to the goal of understanding how information is integrated across visual channels.
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