Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sensory information is a priori incomplete andambiguous. Our perceptual system has to makepredictions about the sources of the sensoryinformation, based on concepts from perceptualmemory in order to create stable and reliablepercepts. We presented ambiguous anddisambiguated lattice stimuli (variants of the Neckercube) in order to measure a hysteresis effects invisual perception. Fifteen healthy participantsobserved two periods of ordered sequences oflattices with increasing and decreasing ambiguityand indicated their percepts, in two experimentalconditions with different starting stimuli of theordered sequence. We compared the stimulusparameters at the perceptual reversal betweenconditions and periods and found significantdifferences between conditions and periods,indicating memory contributions to perceptualoutcomes on three different time scales frommilliseconds over seconds up to lifetime memory.Our results demonstrate the fruitful application ofphysical concepts like hysteresis andcomplementarity to visual perception.