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Infants’ responsiveness to half‐occlusions in phantom stereograms
Author(s) -
Kavšek Michael
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
infancy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.361
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1532-7078
pISSN - 1525-0008
DOI - 10.1111/infa.12362
Subject(s) - imaging phantom , monocular , stereoscopy , psychology , computer vision , binocular disparity , stereopsis , artificial intelligence , optics , computer science , physics
The present natural preference study investigated infants 4 and 7 months of age for their ability to respond to phantom contoubrs, illusory surfaces generated by half‐occlusions in a stereoscopic display consisting of a pair of parallel vertical lines. The left line in the half‐image for the right eye and the right line in the half‐image for the left eye have a gap in the middle. The visual system accounts for the binocular unmatched gaps by perceiving an illusory contour. Infants in the experimental condition were presented with a standard phantom stereogram displaying a phantom contour versus a non‐standard phantom stereogram, the half‐images of which were exchanged. This stereogram evokes the impression of two small separate illusory contours. In both stereograms, the gaps moved up and down. The participants aged 7 but not 4 months preferred looking at the standard phantom stereogram. A control condition supported the hypothesis that the infants 7 months of age in the experimental condition indeed responded to the coherent illusory surface instead of simply detecting differences in the geometric arrangement of the half‐occlusions. The results hence indicate that infants are able to extract spatial information from monocular regions in a binocular display.