Configuration specificity in bisection acuity

Crucial for the perception of form are the spatial relationships between the elements of a visual stimulus. To investigate the mechanisms involved in coding the distance between visual stimuli, thresholds for detecting whether a central marker accurately bisects a spatial interval were compared for a variety of configurations. Thresholds are best when all three members of the bisection configuration are identical. Performance is impaired, often by as much as a factor of two, when the outer delimiters of the spatial interval differ from the central marker in either length, orientation or contrast polarity. Illusory contours act poorly as borders for bisection by a central line. Disparity thresholds are not affected by orientation differences between test and flanking lines. Because in peripheral vision bisection acuity improves with practice, transfer of training between configurations can be used to gauge overlap of neural processing mechanisms. Transfer is complete only between patterns where all markers are similar, reduced when the outer markers differ by 20 degrees in orientation and absent when they are orthogonal. The dependence of bisection discrimination on similarity between the elements of the stimulus demonstrates that the encoding of spatial location and spatial extent are coupled to the coding of other stimulus properties.