To determine whether nonvisual (vestibular and somatosensory) information participates in low-level orientation processing, subjects in different postural conditions (upright, supine, and sitting immobilized) searched for a target distinguishable from distractors by difference in orientation (A. Treisman's, 1985, "pop-out" paradigm). Searches for vertical and horizontal targets were dramatically modified as a function of the postural position, indicating that the processing of orientation in early vision is not only retinal but integrates information from the sensory graviceptors. This visuovestibular phenomenon is interpreted in the conceptual framework of D. H. Foster and P. A. Ward's (1991a) model based on local orthogonal orientation filters and T. A. Stoffregen and G. E. Riccio's (1988) dynamics of balance theory.
To see if the spatial reference frame used by pre-attentive vision is specified in a retino-centered frame or in a reference frame integrating visual and nonvisual information (vestibular and somatosensory), subjects were centrifuged in a nonpendular cabin and were asked to search for a target distinguishable from distractors by difference in orientation (Treisman’s “pop-out” paradigm [1]). In a control condition, in which subjects were sitting Immobilized but not centrifuged, this task gave an asymmetric search pattern: Search was rapid and pre-attentional except when the target was aligned with the horizontal retinal/head axis, in which case search was slow and attentional (2). Results using a centrifuge showed that slow/serial search patterns were obtained when the target was aligned with the subjective horizontal axis (and not with the horizontal retinal/head axis). These data suggest that a multisensory reference frame is used in pre-attentive vision. The results are interpreted in terms of Riccio and Stoffregen’s “ecological theory” of orientation in which the vertical and horizontal axes constitute independent reference frames (3).
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