Cueing the interpretation of a Necker Cube:a way to inspect fundamental cognitive processes

摘要

The term perceptual bistability refers to allthose conditions in which an observer looks at an ambig-uous stimulus that can have two or more distinct butequally reliable interpretations. In this work, we investigateperception of Necker Cube in which bistability consists ofthe possibility to interpret the cube depth in two differentways. We manipulated the cube ambiguity by darkeningone of the cube faces (cue) to provide a clear cube inter-pretation due to the occlusion depth index. When theposition of the cue is stationary the cube perceived per-spective is steady and driven by the cue position. However,when we alternated in time the cue position (i.e. wechanged the position of the darkened cube face) two dif-ferent perceptual phenomena occurred: for low frequenciesthe cube perspective alternated in line with the position ofthe cue; however for high frequencies the cue was nolonger able to bias the perception but it appears as afloating feature traveling across the solid with the cubewhole perspective that returns to be bistable as in theconventional, bias-free, case.