The investigation of the visual system produced models based on the neural components of such system, capable of describing the way in which the velocity information contained in a scene with movement is extracted. The fact that these models are sensitive to the size of the stimuli in combination with the distance to which the objects are presented on the retina, led to the question about how it could be possible the perception of a velocity independent from the object distance. In this work, we revised the investigations about velocity constancy and explore the effect of familiarity on the perception of speed. We performed a series of psychophysical experiments by using natural images and show that familiarity plays an important role in the assignment of a perceived speed to moving objects.
Perception of velocity; Visual psychophysics; Retinal velocity; Velocity constancy; Natural images
