Evidence for scene-based motion correspondence.

To maintain stable object representations as our eyes or the objects themselves move, the visual system must determine how newly sampled information relates to existing object representations. To solve this correspondence problem, the visual system uses not only spatiotemporal information (e.g., the spatial and temporal proximity between elements), but also feature information (e.g., the similarity in size or luminance between elements). Here we asked whether motion correspondence relies solely on image-based feature information, or whether it is influenced by scene-based information (e.g., the perceived sizes of surfaces or the perceived illumination conditions). We manipulated scene-based information separately from image-based information in the Ternus display, an ambiguous apparent-motion display, and found that scene-based information influences how motion correspondence is resolved, indicating that theories of motion correspondence that are based on "scene-blind" mechanisms are insufficient.