Visual perception and perceptual processing in real and virtual environments

It was still hot all day and night at the end of September 2001 in the ancient town of Nara. The Second Joint Japanese-Swiss Scientific Seminar titled “Visual Perception and Perceptual Processing in Real and Virtual Environments,” supported by both the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), was held at Nara from 25–28 September 2001. It was no accident that researchers of visual perception based in two different nations and cultures, Japan and Switzerland, came together in 1999 and 2001. The centennial anniversary of the establishment of the first experimental psychology laboratory by Wilhelm M. Wundt was celebrated at the 22nd International Congress of Psychology at Leipzig/GDR in 1980. Professor Rudolf Groner organized the Symposium for Eye Movements and Cognition there. I never expected that such a long-term continuous exchange with him on research and culture would begin at that moment. Two decades have passed since then. A brief history of the joint seminar was described in Japanese Psychological Research and the Swiss Journal of Psychology, published in 2000 as the proceedings for the meeting (Groner, Groner, & Koga, 2000a, 2000b). We are proud that both of these representative international journals of psychology published the proceedings simultaneously in each country independently and arranged such a comprehensive overview of the communication with each other so effectively. Now the second opportunity has arrived to again publish another such volume. After the first meeting we thought that meeting only one time was insufficient, and that we should meet again to gain a deeper understanding of our science based on our different cultural backgrounds. There were many interactive opportunities for our group, such as visiting the laboratories together and participating in the international science meeting. As examples, B. Kersten from the University of Bern visited Chukyo University as a visiting researcher in joint collaboration with K. Tsuji, while M. Menozzi worked for 3 months at Nagoya University as a visiting researcher jointly with K. Koga. Also, N. Takahashi received her PhD in Bern after the meeting and visited the laboratory of M. Menozzi in ETH Zurich as a postdoctoral researcher. K. Tsuji visited Switzerland repeatedly and discussed with the Swiss members not only about his research subjects but also the future exchange program between both countries beyond the university level, taking into account the horizon of national level for the young psychologists. Those activities indicated that the first meeting had encouraged the members who participated to continue the mutual collaboration quite intensively. We are eager to promote this project in the future on an ongoing basis and make our contribution to Japanese Psychological Research by showing evidence of what has been done and what should be done in the future. The basic principle behind organizing a meeting supported by the JSPS and SNSF was simply to hold a focused group seminar during which the members could exchange ideas and discuss highly specialized subjects. We carefully brought together members so as to include aggressive researchers in the visual perception and related research areas. I have great confidence that all the members who took part in the meeting are all more active than ever today in both countries. Seven researchers from Switzerland and 12 from Japan participated in the meeting. Figure 1 shows the members who took part in the seminar. Members who took part in the seminar. Front row (left to right): N. Takahashi (Aichi Shukutoku University), K. Koga (Nagoya University), K. Tsuji (Chukyo University), B. Kersten (University of Bern), E. Shollerer (University of Bern), A Schwaninger (University of Zurich), F. Mast (University of Zurich), and K. Bingushi (Chukyo University). Back row (left to right): A. Higashiyama (Ritsumeikan University), M. Fleuckiger (University of Geneva), S. Sumi (Teikyo Heisei University), R. Groner (University of Bern), S. Nakamizo (Kyushu University), K. Shimono (Tokyo Marini University), N. Fujita (Tochi University), H. Honda (Niigata University), A. Kitaoka (Ritsumeikan University), M. Menozzi (ETH Zurich), and K. Sakurai (Tohoku Gakuin University). The three days of talks and discussions took place both day and night at the Nara Hotel. The conference facilities presented both the traditional Japanese and a Western hybrid style of architecture established in the beginning of the 20th century in 1910 near the end of the Meiji Era. The main theme of the meeting was basic research on visual perception, development and individual differences, motion perception, binocular functions for visual perception, new media and technologies for visual perception, visual attention, intersensory cooperative eye movements, and orientation perception. To begin with, the general purpose of the meeting was reviewed, and we then defined how the human subject is exposed to natural and artificial environments in life as it is today. Our visual environments have changed dramatically in just the last 100 years compared with our past human natural history in terms of various new artificial presentations or innovations from high-speed traffic systems. Artificial visual presentations started as a large-scale theater play, diorama, motion picture, TV screen presentation, HMD display, etc. These visual presentations had as their primary purpose the creation of artificial visual scenes as realistic as or even more so than daily life events. However, the current media have merely provided the unusual and unrealistically exaggerated fake presentations so very popular in Hollywood movies. Computer-aided screen plays and fake visual motion presentations might only serve to increase this type of visual presentation more and more in the future. However, our daily life presents a different reality in terms of environments. The question is whether or not our visual system can encode such modern unrealistically exaggerated visual presentation, and whether we can cope with such visual environments. Another example of the change in visual environments has been ushered in with the development of transportation systems. Driving a car, operating a high-speed bullet train system, and flying high-tech supersonic aircraft are some typical instances. Most of the systems are supported by computer-aided fail-safe algorithms. But we have no support system in our own perception processes against such unusual high-speed environments. Visual motion stimuli tend to become faster and faster independent of changes or adaptations of the human visual system in our primary visual cortex and integrative functioning in the frontal and temporal areas of the cortex. Does our visual system work properly in such environments? We have historically been managing our daily lives under our own controlled behavior in the midst of our visual environments for more than 50 million years. Yet the above-mentioned unusual visual environments have evolved only during the last 100 years. We should discuss how our visual system tolerates this new and seemingly endless spectrum of change of visual environmental factors in our contemporary life. To begin the discussion of these subjects, we started from the viewpoint of the limit of plasticity of visual function by analyzing human subjective percepts based on various common/uncommon visually stimulated environments led by vision researchers coming from countries like Switzerland and Japan who are exposed to modern visually cultured environments. Those above-mentioned subjects are closely related to each other at the root of the research on “visual perception.” The rather small size of the group meetings enabled intimate, in-depth discussions very effectively. After the meetings, many participants recognized our common knowledge not only in regard to our own research agenda but also with other adjoining research areas. At the end of the meeting itself, we agreed to publish the proceedings in both countries again. The ideal format for the proceedings was discussed, and agreement was finally reached that the responsible organizer from each country would ask the editorial board of the representative psychology science journals to publish the proceedings as a special issue. Fortunately, Switzerland has the Swiss Journal of Psychology, and Japan has Japanese Psychological Research. The same process as the first meeting was chosen, and the Swiss Journal of Psychology published the proceedings in the fall of 2004 (Groner, Tsuji, & Koga, 2004). The Japanese side was delayed a bit, but we were pleased to be able to publish the proceedings in 2005 within a year after its publication in the Swiss Journal of Psychology. We most gratefully acknowledge here the generous support of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and the Swiss National Science Foundation in promoting the joint seminar. Also, our heartfelt thanks to the editorial board of Japanese Psychological Research of the Japanese Psychological Association for accepting our request to publish the special issue again. Our gratitude also to the editor responsible for the special issue, Dr H. Honda, who was also a member of the joint seminar project. He unfailingly encouraged us to continue editing and reviewing the manuscripts with his strict insistence on maintaining high scientific standards. Publication of this issue would have been impossible without his help and kind encouragement. We also thank the chief editor of the journal, Dr Y. Hakoda, who kindly relayed to us the appropriate editing procedures throughout all the processes, including the interaction with the reviewers and contributors. This substantially shortened the preparation term for the publication. Also, our sincere thanks to all of the reviewers who carefully reviewed the manuscripts. I personally came to realize that the best reader for the journal is the individual reviewer. The reviewers involved in this issue always gave their full attention to each manuscript and helped the contributors revise them to a much higher level. Usually reviewers are perceived only as having the right and authority to reject or accept manuscripts as “specially selected” persons. I have changed my mind on this matter completely. They are simply the best collaborators possible for the contributors who submit their manuscripts to the journal and always work closely with us. The session opened on 25 September with the organizers from Switzerland and Japan giving a history of the past research relationship between our two countries and a general explanation of the meeting. The proceedings included some of the topics covered in the sessions. I have briefly summarized them here. B. Kersten, M. Groner, and R. Groner, with their interest in eye-movement behaviors in visual research, presented evidence of top-down controlling mechanisms in complex research situations. There are two different mechanisms, one for the stimulus-driven information mechanism and the other for the search intention processing mechanism that works reciprocally. This two-pathway mechanism works well also to explain human search behaviors under the rich environments in our daily life. N. Fujita proposed the relationship between motion behavior and perceptual processes under nonvisually guided conditions by occlusion with crystallized goggles to eliminate visual feedback signals to the subjects and to evaluate their subjective accuracy in estimating the distance to targets, which strongly supports the perceptual learning processes based on perceptual-motor connections. R. Groner and E. Schollerer showed subjective velocity perception using the point-light walker stimuli under various background motion stimuli. The results of their study indicate that the motion cue has a large amount of information on the background motion characteristics against a moving object, even for simplified moving objects such as point-light walkers. S. Sumi also discussed how in human cognitive functions the visual system can recognize and discriminate sex from the point-light walker stimuli. He argued for the existence of highly complex cognitive processes for the recognition of human motion in connection with sex. He introduced the point-light walker to simplify the visual stimuli and indicated that the general visual system could play an important part in identifying object characteristics. A. Kitaoka proposed a new model for perceptual transparency by introducing the Adelson-Anandan-Anderson X-junction contrast-polarity model to explain how the human visual system can achieve perceptual transparency for objects. He argued several possibilities to explain this, and pointed out two factors affecting perceptual transparency; one is the average luminance level for the adjacent part of the stimuli, and the other is the different luminance level for each visual stimuli. Meanwhile, B. Baumberger presented some aspects of distance perception in the driving simulator. His experiments are particularly specialized in the area of decision-making for passing a vehicle in front. The more difficult the situation, the greater the error in the distance estimated. K. Bingushi, for his part, proposed new theoretical explanations for the inhibitory mechanism from monocular retinal images to the binocular single image generations, emphasizing retinal rivalry against Panum's fusion images and introducing various experimental results. It might also be of benefit to readers in Japan to list (Table 1) the titles and authors appearing in the special issue of the Swiss Journal of Psychology Vol. 63(4). It reflects how closely the two psychology communities have worked with one another. What was so scientifically fruitful was the fact that members of two vision groups that had never met, from two countries so far apart, could talk to each other in such a lively atmosphere without any introductory messages at the meeting. The first talk on the first day of the meeting was not part of any prepared formal ceremony but began simply and naturally. Throughout the sessions during the 3 days, we found cross-relational problems in vision that urgently need solving. For instance, one of the conclusions we reached was how our visual function is closely connected with locomotive behaviors. We probably cannot understand our visual function properly if we neglect this important aspect. The entire meeting has been presented in two special publications as proceedings, one in this journal and the other in the Swiss Journal of Psychology, which was already published last year in 2004 as Vol. 63(3). I am also proud of the second joint publishing of the proceedings by the representative psychology journals from both Japan and Switzerland, connecting the East and the West. I hope a third meeting will be held to further stimulate work in this area of research. There is a huge gate in Nara called Nandaimon. It was built in the 12th century in front of the Todaiji Temple in Nara. Two sculptures, “A” and “Un,” were carved by two famous sculptors, Unkei and Kaikei, and their teams. The left one, “A,” with its mouth open, signifies the beginning of everything, while the one on the right, “Un,” with its mouth closed, means the end of all events. These names correspond to the first and last letters of Sanskrit. It would seem to this observer, at least, that our Japanese and Swiss seminar is located quite near the “A” sculpture and is yet rather distant from the “Un.”

Cognitive psychology · Joint (building) · Perception · Visual perception · Action Observation and Synchronization · Engineering · Neuroscience · Psychology · Spatial Cognition and Navigation · Visual perception and processing mechanisms