Independence of orientation and size in spatial discriminations

Abstract

This study of form vision explores the relationships between orientation and spatial frequency in suprathreshold discrimination tasks. Orientation discrimination thresholds for sine-wave gratings were 0.3–0.5 deg, much less than the roughly 10–24-deg orientational bandwidth of channels; spatial-frequency discrimination thresholds were 3–7%, much less than the roughly 1.2-octave spatial-frequency bandwidth of channels. We find that spatial-frequency discrimination between two gratings was as acute when the two gratings were orthogonal as when they were parallel. Orientation discrimination between two gratings was as acute when the two gratings had the same spatial frequencies as when they had different spatial frequencies. Thus orientation and spatial frequency are independent dimensions at the discrimination stage of spatial information processing.