Measuring the double-drift illusion and its resets with hand trajectories

Abstract

If a Gabor pattern drifts in one direction while its internal texture drifts in the orthogonal direction, its perceived position deviates further and further away from its true path. We first evaluated the illusion using manual tracking. Participants followed the Gabor with a stylus on a drawing tablet that coincided optically with the horizontal monitor surface. Their hand and the stylus were not visible during the tracking. The magnitude of the tracking illusion corresponded closely to previous perceptual and pointing measures indicating that manual tracking is a valid measure for the illusion. This allowed us to use it in a second experiment to capture the behavior of the illusion as it eventually degrades and breaks down in single trials. Specifically, the deviation of the Gabor stops accumulating at some point and either stays at a fixed offset or resets toward the veridical position. To report the perceived trajectory of the Gabor, participants drew it after the Gabor was removed from the monitor. Resets were detected and analyzed and their distribution matches neither a temporal nor a spatial limit, but rather a broad gamma distribution over time. This suggests that resets are triggered randomly, about once per 1.3 seconds, possible by extraneous distractions or eye movements.