Visual perception of liquids in motion

Visual Features in the Perception of Liquids

Perceptual constancy-identifying surfaces and objects across large image changes-remains an important challenge for visual neuroscience [1-8]. Liquids are particularly challenging because they respond to external forces in complex, highly variable ways, presenting an enormous range of images to the visual system. To achieve constancy, the brain must perform a causal inference [9-11] that disent...

Seeing liquids from visual motion

Most research on human visual recognition focuses on solid objects, whose identity is defined primarily by shape. In daily life, however, we often encounter materials that have no specific form, including liquids whose shape changes dynamically over time. Here we show that human observers can recognize liquids and their viscosities solely from image motion information. Using a two-dimensional a...

Perception of Visual Motion

Visual motion perception.

The primate visual motion system performs numerous functions essential for survival in a dynamic visual world. Prominent among these functions is the ability to recover and represent the trajectories of objects in a form that facilitates behavioral responses to those movements. The first step toward this goal, which consists of detecting the displacement of retinal image features, has been stud...

The visual perception of motion

Sensing the movements of the world and the objects within it appears to be a fundamental job for our visual system. In rare cases of brain damage, we find that individuals lacking motion perception live in a very different world of frozen images, where simple tasks like filling a kettle or crossing the road take on alarming difficulties. That tasks such as driving a fast car down the freeway re...