Forward optic flow is prioritised in visual awareness independently of walking direction

Abstract

When two different images are presented separately to each eye, one experiences smooth transitions between them–a phenomenon called binocular rivalry. Previous studies have shown that exposure to signals from other senses can enhance the access of stimulation-congruent images to conscious perception. However, despite our ability to infer perceptual consequences from bodily movements, evidence that action can have an analogous influence on visual awareness is scarce and mainly limited to hand movements. Here, we investigated whether one’s direction of locomotion affects perceptual access to optic flow patterns during binocular rivalry. Participants walked forwards and backwards on a treadmill while viewing highly-realistic visualisations of self-motion in a virtual environment. We hypothesised that visualisations congruent with walking direction would predominate in visual awareness over incongruent ones, and that this effect would increase with the precision of one’s active proprioception. These predictions were not confirmed: optic flow consistent with forward locomotion was prioritised in visual awareness independently of walking direction and proprioceptive abilities. Our findings suggest the limited role of kinaesthetic-proprioceptive information in disambiguating visually perceived direction of self-motion and indicate that vision might be tuned to the (expanding) optic flow patterns prevalent in everyday life.

Using Immersive Virtual Reality to Study Road-Crossing Sustainability in Fleeting Moments of Space and Time

“…Research on the psychology and brain science of walking and locomotion suggests that these flow factors are critical in how people make their way through space, and within cluttered and busy spaces in particular [130][131][132][133]. While the graphics in our system are admittedly far from realistic, we are encouraged by our findings, which ally the system, at least colloquially, to important theories in psychology regarding movement and motion cues [130,[134][135][136][137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147][148]. Reproducing these behavioral products in users, we reason, is a more significant goal for understanding crossing behavior than fine-tuning realistic appearance fidelity.…”

A Typology of Virtual Reality Locomotion Techniques

“…Walking-in-place (WIP) is still a prevalent VR locomotion technique (corresponding with the results from [3]). When looking more closely into the studies using WIP, a considerable number of them used treadmills for motion performance [11,31,35,41,53,58], which may suggest a need for "a more explicit focus on the perceived naturalness of WIP techniques; i.e., the degree to which WIP locomotion feels like real walking" [63]. Achieving higher levels of immersion may be the goal here, and more work on that topic, theoretical or technical, could be a promising research direction.…”

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