Form and Temporal Integration in the Perception of Simple Glass Patterns

This study presents a reanalysis of existing data to clarify how the visual system processes simple dynamic Glass patterns (GPs), with a particular focus on translational configurations. By combining datasets from previous studies, we apply a mixed-effects modeling approach—which offers advantages over the statistical methods used in previous studies—to investigate the contributions of pattern update rate and number of unique frames to perceptual sensitivity. Our findings indicate that the number of unique frames is the most robust predictor of discrimination thresholds, supporting the idea that the visual system integrates global form information across multiple frames—a process consistent with spatiotemporal summation. In contrast, the pattern update rate showed a weaker, though statistically significant, effect. This suggests that faster updates help preserve temporal consistency between frames, facilitating global form extraction. These results align with previous observations on complex dynamic GPs, where discrimination thresholds decrease with more unique frames, suggesting that the summation of form signals across time plays a key role in form–motion perception. By adopting a mixed-effects modeling approach, our reanalysis provides new insights into the mechanisms underlying global form perception in dynamic GPs.