The time course of estimating time-to-contact: switching between sources of information

The different sources of information that can be used to estimate time-to-contact may have different degrees of reliability across time. For example, after a given presentation or display time, an absolute change of angular size can be more reliable than the corresponding estimation of the rate of angular expansion (e.g. motion information). One could then expect systematic biases in the observer's responses for different times of stimulus exposure. In one experiment, observers judged whether approaching objects arrived at the point of observation before or after a reference beep (1.2s) under monocular, and binocular plus monocular vision. Five display times from 0.1 to 0.9s were used. Unlike monocular viewing, where accuracy increased monotonically with display time, an interesting non-linearity occurred for objects with small size when binocular information was available. Accuracy reached maximum values for small objects with only 0.3s of vision with stereopsis. This accuracy, however, dropped significantly after 0.4s of exposure and increased again linearly with time. This is consistent with subjects switching from using binocular information to using monocular motion information when it started to become more reliable. We also explored whether monocular cues were combined differently across time by fitting a model that relates visual angle to its rate of expansion. Results show that subjects relied more on angular motion information (i.e. rate of expansion) with presentation time but interrupting this motion integration process led to a loss of accuracy in time-to-contact judgments.