The effect of colour matching on perceptual integration of pictures and frames

ABSTRACT

A black frame presented around one of 12 pictures during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) was frequently misperceived as surrounding the preceding or following picture in the sequence (temporal migration; Intraub, 1985, 1989). Would temporal migration of the frame be reduced if the frame and picture shared a common property (colour)? Two different colour frames were created for each picture: one matching and one mismatching the picture’s most prevalent colour (Experiment 1) as determined by a computational image colour summarizer (Krzywinski, 2018). Presentation rate was 100 ms/picture. Colour-matching significantly reduced temporal migration (4.3%), but the effect was small. To determine if greater colour-overlap would yield a larger effect, frames composed of colour “tiles” that matched or mismatched each picture’s four most prevalent colours were presented at a rate of 111 ms/picture (Experiment 2). Again, a small, significant reduction in temporal migration was observed (3.2%). Although pictures and frames are distinct forms, the probability of correct integration of the two appears to be affected by the presence of a common property (colour). Results are discussed in terms of an integrative short-term buffer. Possible application of the temporal migration paradigm to studying visual integration of components of real-world scenes is addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual perception
• visual integration
• rapid serial visual presentation
• conceptual short-term store
• perceptual error

Acknowledgements

We thank research assistants Nick Catania, Kelsey Nelson, and Mariela Jiménez for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Experiment 2 was pre-registered in Open Science and all stimuli, frames, and data for Experiments 1 and 2 are available at the same Open Science link: https://osf.io/2srj3/.

Notes

1 With only 65/92 planned participants tested, although the overall results were similar to those in Experiment 2, the colour matching effect was significant only when the four outlier pictures were removed (as described in Experiment 2: Results section). In this case, the percent of responses reporting the −1, 0 (hit), and +1 pictures on colour-matched trials were, 28.6%, 57.6%, and 8.4%, respectively; on colour colour-mismatched trials, 31.5%, 54.8% and 8.0%, respectively. Hit rate was higher in the colour-matched condition, t(64) = 2.03, p = 0.047, Cohen’s dz = 0.254.