Spontaneous patterns in the perceived direction of motion in ambiguous motion quartets: Effect of perception or judgment?

In a motion quartet (MQ), perceived direction of rotation is bistable, sometimes clockwise (C) sometimes counterclockwise (c). We reported (Martello et al, 2004 Journal of Vision 4 in press, abstract) that observers exhibited spontaneous patterns across time in their responses. Our results could be explained as completion of two kinds of patterns: (i) sequences (eg CCCC > C), and (ii) alternations (eg CcCc > C). We report an experiment intended to determine whether the effect of past perceptions is present even when the observer does not overtly judge the direction of MQs. We collected psychometric functions P(C|angle) for sixteen subjects who viewed almost 2000 MQ trials each. The trials were organised in groups of four (tetrads) and the angles in the MQs for the first three trials in each tetrad were chosen so that we could control the perceived direction of motion on these trials. The observer did not respond to these trials but simply observed them. On the fourth trial of each tetrad, the subject saw an MQ whose direction he judged. We found that the alternating sequences CcC and cCc still led to a strong bias to completion but that the effect of the cumulative sequences ccc and CCC had vanished.