바로가기메뉴

본문 바로가기 주메뉴 바로가기

logo

Perception of a surface split induced by globally inconsistent kinetic occlusion: Objects composed of salient parts break apart easily

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology / The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology, (P)1226-9654; (E)2733-466X
2017, v.29 no.1, pp.97-104
https://doi.org/10.22172/cogbio.2017.29.1.007

  • Downloaded
  • Viewed

Abstract

Many theories of shape perception assume that objects are the perceptual units, but complex objects are composed of distinct parts and thus the visual system can also represent object shapes at the level of smaller parts. The minima rule proposes that the visual system uses negative minima of curvature to define boundaries between parts. We employed a new experimental paradigm, globally inconsistent kinetic occlusion, to test whether the minima rule reliably mirrors regularities in the physical world, where concave contour segments often correspond to part boundaries. Participants observed animations of a target object moving across another static object, where the top half of the target was occluding, and simultaneously the bottom half occluded by the static object. This situation generated two competing perceptual interpretations: either the target cleaving the static object into two separated in depth, or the target being cleaved into two surfaces by the static one. We manipulated the sign and magnitude of contour curvature between the top and bottom halves of an object, so that 6 shapes were employed as moving targets. This result showed that targets with concave minima were more likely perceived as splitting into two surfaces than those with convex maxima or zero curvature. This finding suggests that the visual system parses shapes into parts, taking advantage of negative minima of curvature, and that part structure affects surface representations in accordance with ecological/physical regularities of the visual world.

keywords
part, negative minima, part salience, inconsistent kinetic occlusion, 부분, 오목한 극점, 부분 현저성, 비일관적 운동중첩

Reference

1.

Barenholtz, E., Cohen, E. H., Feldman, J., & Singh, M. (2003). Detection of change in shape: An advantage for concavities. Cognition, 89, 1–9.

2.

Barenholtz, E., & Feldman, J. (2003). Visual comparisons within and between object parts:Evidence for a single-part superiority effect. Vision Research, 43, 1655–1666.

3.

Baylis, G. C., & Driver, J. (1995). One-sided edge assignment in vision: Figure ground segmentation and attention to objects. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 4, 140.146.

4.

Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding. Psychological Review, 94, 115.117.

5.

Biederman, I., & Cooper, E. E. (1991). Priming contour-deleted images: evidence for intermediate representations in visual object recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 393-419.

6.

Cohen, E. H., Barenholtz, E., Singh, M., & Feldman, J. (2005). What change detection tells us about the visual representation of shape. Journal of Vision, 5, 313.321.

7.

Gibson, J. J., Kaplan, G. A., Reynolds, H. N., & Wheeler, K. (1969). The change from visible to invisible: A study of optical transitions. Perception & Psychophysics, 5, 113–116.

8.

Goldstone, R. L. (2000). Unitization during category learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology:Human Perception and Performance, 26, 86-112.

9.

Hecht, L. N., & Vecera, S. P. (2007). Attentional selection of complex objects: Joint effects of surface uniformity and part structure. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 1205-1211.

10.

Hoffman, D. D., & Richards, W. A. (1984). Parts of recognition. Cognition, 18, 65-96.

11.

Hoffman, D. D., & Singh, M. (1997). Salience of visual parts. Cognition, 63, 29-78.

12.

Jung, W. H., & Chung, C, S. (2006). Perceiving the Orientation of Linear Edges from Kinetic Occlusion. Korean Journal of Cognitive Science, 17, 151-175.

13.

Kaplan, G. A. (1969). Kinetic disruption of optical texture: The perception of depth at an edge. Perception & Psychophysics, 6, 193–198.

14.

Kim, S. H., & Kim, J. O. (2011). The benefit of surface uniformity for encoding boundary features in visual working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37, 1767.

15.

Marr, D., & Nishihara, H. K. (1978). Representation and recognition of three-dimensional shapes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B, 200, 269-294.

16.

Michotte, A., Thinés, G., & Crabbé, G. (1991). Amodal completion of perceptual structures. In G. Thinés, A. Costall, & G. Butterworth (Eds.). Michotte’s experimental phenomenology of perception (pp. 140-167). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum (Original work published 1964).

17.

Palmer, S. E. (1977). Hierarchical structure in perceptual representation. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 441-474.

18.

Scholl, B. J., & Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1999). Tracking multiple items through occlusion: Clues to visual objecthood. Cognitive Psychology, 38, 259-290.

19.

Schyns, P. G., & Rodet, L. (1998). Categorization creates functional features. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 681–696.

20.

Singh, M., & Hoffman, D. D. (1998). Part boundaries alter the perception of transparency. Psychological Science, 9, 370-378.

21.

Watson, S. E., & Kramer, A. F. (1999). Object based visual selective attention. Perception and Psychophysics, 61, 31–49.

22.

Wolfe, J. M., & Bennett, S. C. (1997). Preattentive object files: Shapeless bundles of basic features. Vision Research, 37, 25–44.

23.

Xu, Y., & Singh, M. (2002). Early computation of part structure: Evidence from visual search. Perception & Psychophysics, 67, 1039–1054.

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology