Artificial looming yields improved performance over lateral motion: implications for stereoscopic display techniques

In the natural world, a number of visual cues indicate that an item is quickly approaching the perceiver. Binocular disparity is one cue for depth, and it has been demonstrated that abrupt changes in disparity, artificially unaccompanied by correlated depth cues, are capable of causing the perception of looming for the observer. An experiment involving 38 undergraduates, using a computer-controlled stereoscopic display, examined the ability of above-threshold changes in disparity (artificial looming) to facilitate response time and accuracy for observers engaged in an object-enumeration task within a cluttered display. Compared with performance using the same stimuli without disparity information (lateral motion), participants were more accurate regardless of the disparity level (9, 12, 24, or 48 minutes of arc) and faster at the two lowest levels of disparity. Participants showed the classic subitizing function, suggesting that target stimuli presented with motion information were segregated from otherwise identical distractor items. It is proposed that binocular disparity information can act as a valid location cuing method in stereoscopic computer displays in which form and color information are to be preserved.