FACTORS LIMITING LARGE-SCALE LOCALIZATION

The mechanisms mediating relative spatial localisation in the visual system are still unclear. There is a growing amount of evidence that this capability is not merely limited by the processing of the front-end visual system. Models of localisation should, therefore, include higher-level processing stages. A careful study of the sources of error in localisation tasks may further our understanding of the nature of these processes. A study is reported in which the possible role of higher-order processing in relative spatial localisation is explicitly addressed. For this purpose the error sources of threshold performance were investigated for two similar relative-spatial-localisation tasks: two-dot separation discrimination and two-dot orientation discrimination. Fovea-centred stimuli with large dot separations were used. The front-end processing for these stimuli is probably identical in both tasks. Hence, differential effects of the variation of the experimental parameters on threshold performance for both tasks may reveal the characteristics of the higher-level processing involved. The effects of dot separation, stimulus orientation, and experimental procedure (single-stimulus binary forced choice versus two-alternative forced choice) on threshold performance for both tasks are reported. The results show that thresholds for both tasks increase proportionally with dot separation. However, separation-discrimination thresholds are always significantly higher than orientation-discrimination thresholds. Thresholds for separation discrimination are independent of stimulus orientation. In contrast, orientation-discrimination thresholds show an oblique effect: thresholds are consistently lower for horizontal stimuli. Both tasks also show a different dependency of threshold behaviour on the experimental procedure. For a horizontal stimulus orientation, separation discrimination is better with an explicit (physical) reference standard, whereas orientation discrimination is better with an implicit referent. These differential effects cannot be explained by any of the known characteristics of the front-end visual system. They suggest that large-scale spatial-localisation performance is probably limited at a processing level at which spatial relations are explicitly represented.