Pop-out for illusory rather than veridical trajectories with double-drift stimuli

If a patch of texture drifts in one direction while its internal texture drifts in the orthogonal direction, the perceived direction of this double-drift stimulus (also known as the infinite regress and curveball illusions) deviates strongly from its physical direction. Here, we use double-drift stimuli to construct two types of search arrays: The first had an oddball target in terms of the physical trajectories, but no oddball for the perceived trajectory, whereas the second had a perceptual oddball, but no physical oddball. We used these two arrays to determine whether pop-out operates over physical or perceived trajectories. Participants reported the location of the odd double-drift stimulus that had either a unique physical or perceived trajectory in a set of four or eight items. When the distractors all shared one perceived trajectory, but the target had an odd perceived trajectory, it popped out even though the physical trajectories of the stimuli were mixed: Accuracy rates were at ceiling, and response times decreased with increasing set size. In contrast, participants were significantly less accurate and slower at finding the physical oddball when all the paths had a common perceived trajectory. Moreover, responses became less accurate and slower with increasing set size. Our findings suggest that, at least for this type of stimulus, perceptual features can be processed rapidly, whereas the search for physical features is very inefficient.