Collinear effects on 3-Gabor alignment as a function of spacing, orientation and detectability

Our ability to align three Gabor patches depends upon their internal carrier orientation; we are better at aligning vertical or horizontal patches than oblique patches (Keeble and Hess, 1998). However, the tuning of alignment to patch orientation has not studied in detail. We measured the alignment of a vertical target with reference patches varying in orientation and found it tuned to vertical (collinear) patches at centre-to-centre separation of three carrier periods, with a steep increase for oblique references and slight downturn for horizontal (orthogonal) references. Next, we increased separation between the patches, testing collinear, side-by-side, orthogonal and oblique configurations. Surprisingly, we found that the tuning for collinear patches was preserved. All ten observers tested had lower alignment thresholds for collinear patches. This effect extended to an inter-patch separation of 10 carrier periods (20 envelope standard deviations). Additionally, we measured contrast detection thresholds for the reference patches using the same stimuli. The collinear facilitation of alignment was even greater than the collinear facilitation of detection.