Stereoscopic Slant Contrast and the Perception of Inducer Slant at Brief Stimulus Presentations

Slant contrast refers to a stereoscopic phenomenon in which the perceived slant of a test object is affected by the disparity of a surrounding inducer object. Slant contrast has been proposed to involve cue conflict, but it is unclear whether this idea is useful in explaining slant contrast at short stimulus presentations (<1 s). We measured both slant contrast and perceived inducer slant while varying the presentation duration (100–800 ms) of stereograms with several spatial configurations. In three psychophysical experiments, we found that (a) both slant contrast and perceived inducer slant increased as a function of stimulus duration, and (b) slant contrast was relatively stable across different test and inducer shapes at each short stimulus duration, whereas perceived inducer slant increased when cue conflict was reduced. These results suggest that at brief, not long stimulus presentations, the cue conflict between disparity and perspective plays a smaller role in slant contrast than other depth cues.