A test-pedestal approach, with a test grating superimposed on a masking pedestal, was used to compare sinusoidal grating vernier acuity and contrast discrimination thresholds. The goal is to develop a simple model for vernier acuity without assumptions about underlying mechanisms. In the contrast discrimination task, subjects were asked to detect contrast increments in the presence of a base pe...

In a typical experiment on decision making, one out of two possible stimuli is displayed and observers decide which one was presented. Recently, Stanford and colleagues (2010) introduced a new variant of this classical one-stimulus presentation paradigm to investigate the speed of decision making. They found evidence for "perceptual decision making in less than 30 ms". Here, we extended this on...

The present paper asks whether Vernier offset discrimination is limited by the observer's sensitivity to local contrast change in both central and peripheral vision. To answer this question we compared Vernier discrimination and contrast discrimination thresholds (specified in the same units) for a pair of narrow ribbons of cosine gratings. Because the ribbons are narrow, both the offset inform...

Infant and adult vernier acuity differed by a factor of only 4 to 6 when the stimuli were periodic and results were expressed in units of spatial phase. This ratio was much smaller than the factor of 50 to 100 obtained when we expressed our results and those of others in terms of the threshold spatial displacement in visual angle. We compared infant and adult vernier performance to performance ...

Hyperacuity thresholds of a few arc seconds can be achieved psychophysically for a variety of spatial localization tasks. The present experiments show that evoked potentials can be elicited in response to the introduction of vernier offsets, but not by the introduction of other cues to hyperacuity such as bisection or relative pattern motion, although each of these cues is equally salient psych...

In this paper, we propose a generalized procedure for the design of integrated Vernier devices for high performance chemical and biochemical sensing. In particular, we demonstrate the accurate control of the most critical design and fabrication parameters of silicon-on-insulator cascade-coupled racetrack resonators operating in the second regime of the Vernier effect, around 1.55 μm. The experi...

This study examined whether or not vernier acuity would be improved if the location of a briefly presented vernier stimulus was pre-cued. The vernier target appeared alone, or together with straight lines or ellipses. Effects of spatial pre-cuing were found only when straight line distractors were present. It is suggested that since the straight lines are confusable with the vernier targets, th...

When a vernier stimulus is presented for a short time and followed by a grating comprising five straight lines, the vernier remains invisible but may bequeath its offset to the grating (feature inheritance). For more than seven grating elements, the vernier is rendered visible as a shine-through element. However, shine-through depends strongly on the spatio-temporal layout of the grating. Here,...

When a vernier target is flanked by optimally positioned lines, foveal vernier discrimination is strongly degraded (Westheimer and Hauske, 1975). We confirmed this observation (Experiment I) and have mapped out a 2 dimensional "perceptive field" for crowding in the fovea using a 2 dot target (Experiment II). Crowding was also measured in peripheral vision, using either small flanking dots as ma...

Both backward masking and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are capable of hindering perception of a visual target. To study the relationship between these two methods we applied TMS over the occipital pole in combination with the visual backward masking technique shine-through. The recently discovered weak shine-through mask consists of a horizontal grating with 25 vernier elements. In t...