The visual perception of surface orientation from optical motion

Observers viewed monocular animations of rotating dihedral angles and were required to indicate their perceived structures by adjusting the magnitude and orientation of a stereoscopic dihedral angle. The motion displays were created by directly manipulating various aspects of the image velocity fiel d, including the mean translation, the horizontal and vertical velocity gra dients, and the manner in which these gradients changed over time. The adju sted orientation of each planar facet was decomposed into components of sla nt and tilt. Although the tilt component was estimated with a high degree o f accuracy, the judgments of slant exhibited large systematic errors. The m agnitude of perceived slant was determined primarily by the magnitude of th e velocity gradient scaled by its direction. The results also indicate that higher order temporal derivatives of the moving elements had little effect on observers' judgments.