The subject's goal in the task was to indicate the location of an elliptical wooden coin. Each trial began with the central fixation cue flashing for 1500ms. Then, the LEDs of two cubbies, one from each shelf, turned on. On every trial, one of the cubbies cued by LEDs contained a distally elliptical coin (i.e., the subject's target), whereas the other cubby cued by LEDs contained a circular coin (i.e., the distractor). On half of the trials, the distractor was a head-on circular coin; on the other half of the trials, the distractor was a circular coin angled to look 45° rotated on its vertical axis towards the subject. Subjects' task was to select the shelf (left or right) that contained the elliptical coin by pressing the corresponding left or right button on the table in front of them. If perspectival shapes impact perception and attention, then it should be harder to indicate the location of the elliptical object when its foil is a rotated circular coin (whose perspectival shape matches the perspectival shape of the target) than when its foil is a head-on circular coin (whose perspectival shape differs from the perspectival shape of the target). Subjects' head was fixed on a chinrest in Experiment 8, and subjects' heads were unconstrained in Experiment 9.
Note that this is a video of events that in fact took place in the "real world"; as a result, it does not fully capture the experience subjects would have had in the experiment. Most importantly, this video does not make available the binocular depth cues that were available to subjects, who simply sat in front of this display, with both eyes open, in normal lighting conditions.