Perception of the dynamic form of flames in hearth fire F Nagle1, A Johnston1, P W McOwan2 |
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1Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, University College London, United Kingdom |
| Fire has long been a significant part of the visual environment; it may therefore be encoded by specialised neural representations. We investigated, for the first time, the processing and representation of moving flames by measuring recognition performance of dynamic fire. Our delayed match-to-sample task consisted of first presenting a target clip of a log fire in a grate, followed by two similar test sequences. Observers reported which sequence contained the target. Recognition performance decreased with test sequence length (from 74% to 66%; p<0.001) but increased with target length (from 60% to 72%; p<0.00001), which may reflect false positives due to stimulus periodicity. Separately, we manipulated the colour, direction of video playback and spatial orientation between sample and test. Normal recognition performance (76%) was not affected by changing colour (p>0.14), indicating that observers did not rely on chromatic information. Performance was reduced to 72% by reversing playback direction (p<0.02), indicating observers were sensitive to dynamic form; it fell to 66% under spatial inversion (p<0.001), showing that subjects were not using a generic motion cue. Neural representations of fire can therefore be easily matched across the colour domain, and less so under spatial and temporal inversion. |
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