Amplitude, frequency and phase determinants of perceived rotations and rigidity in the kinetic depth effect

In a previous experiment the author has shown how perceived rotations, in the kinetic depth effect, decrease as a function of temporal frequency. It was argued that many of the ambiguous motion effects, and the temporally limited nature of the phenomenon, are due to the inability to discriminate curvature and torsion information as well as the finite time required to extract these latter sequentially dependent image parameters. In this paper we extend the investigation to consider the perception of rotations and rigidity as a function of complexity, including amplitude and phase differences between image elements. Results indicate that perceived rigidity is specifically a function of phase information, or relative motion components, and that rotations decrease as a function of complexity. In this way the curvature and torsion extraction processes are integrated with the sinusoidal nature of the image motion.