MOK

Mechanismen objektbasierter Korrespondenz

01/11/2015 to 31/10/2018

The visual system is able to create and maintain a stable representation of our environment - keeping the identity of the elements around us through changes in space over time - despite the original information that arrives at the retina being ambiguous. For a long time, the dominant view in the field was that the visual system is able to do so, i.e., to establish correspondence between elements, using mainly spatiotemporal proximity that in turn determines motion energy between the elements. Recent studies, however, showed that higher-level factors, e.g., the perceived feature similarity between the elements and the grouping context, could also play an important role in determining correspondence. The aim of this project is to use behavioral experiments, as well as eye tracking and electrophysiological measurements, in order to test specific predictions of a new object-based correspondence mechanism. This mechanism is able to account for the new results and explain the influence of higher-level factors through a correspondence process that is based on object representations instead of basic low-level factors as spatiotemporal proximity. In particular, this project will examine the influence of attention on correspondence, determine the level at which the processing of correspondence is solved, and assess the role that the scene and feature variability of the context play in correspondence.