Principles of perceptual organization and spatial distortion: The gestalt illusions (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
1. In 1912, Max Wertheimer published his paper on phi motion, widely recognized as the start of Gestalt psychology. Because of its continued relevance in modern psychology, this centennial anniversary is an excellent opportunity to take stock of what Gestalt psychology has offered and how it has changed since its inception. We first introduce the key findings and ideas in the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology, and then briefly sketch its development, rise, and fall. Next, we discuss its empirical and conceptual problems, and ...
On the structures of perceptual Gestalten
1985
The objects we perceive exhibit structures and properties which are not indigenous to the world as it is in itself. Thus whilst the two horizontal lines in the MiilIer-Lyer illusion are objectively of equal length, they are experienced as being such that one is shorter than the other. There is a distinction between the structure as we experience it, the perceived Gestalt, and the underlying autonomous objectual formation.
Perceptual grouping in space and in space-time: An exercise in phenomenological psychophysics
Perceptual organization in vision: …, 2003
The Gestalt phenomena of grouping in space and in space-time (proximity, similarity, good continuation, common fate, apparent motion and so on) are an essential foundation of perception. Yet they have remained fairly vague, experimentally intractable, and unquantified. We describe progress we made in the quest for clarity, lawfulness and precision in the formulation of these phenomena.
Spatial Organization and the Appearances Thereof in Early Vision
Visual Experience
The perception of the lightness of surfaces has been shown to be affected by information about the spatial configuration of those surfaces and their illuminants. For example, two surfaces of equal luminance can appear to be of very different lightness if one of the two appears to lie in a shadow. How are we to understand the character of the processes that integrate such spatial configuration information so as to yield the eventual appearance of lightness? This paper makes some simple observations about the vocabulary of appearance used in these contexts, and proposes that the end results can be called "phenomenal" in a traditional sense of that word. Processes whose products are phenomenal are next distinguished from processes characterized in other terms: (a) processes of perceptual grouping; (b) processes of perceptual organization; and (c) attentional (as opposed to preattentive) processes. These four categories are conceptually and empirically distinct. In particular, the paper reviews some evidence that appearances as of contours, occlusion, and amodally completed shapes can occur preattentively. Some implications for understanding gestalt grouping processes are briefly discussed.
Perceptual grouping in space and in spacetime
2002
The first two sections of this chapter are devoted to empirical and theoretical studies of grouping in space and in spacetime. In the first section we summarize recent research on grouping by proximity. We show that grouping by proximity can be modeled with a simple model that has few of the characteristics that one might expect of a Gestalt phenomenon. In the second section we (a) review the literature on the relation between grouping by spatial proximity and grouping by spatiotemporal proximity, and (b) summarize our research that shows that these two processes are inextricably entangled. The third section is meta-methodological. We do phenomenological psychophysics. Because the observers' responses are based on phenomenal experiences, which are still in bad repute among psychologists, we conclude the chapter with an explication of the roots of such skeptical views, and show that they have limited validity.
Size-induced distortions in perceptual maps of visual space
Journal of Vision, 2012
In order to interact with our environment, the human brain constructs maps of visual space. The orderly mapping of external space across the retinal surface, termed retinotopy, is maintained at subsequent levels of visual cortical processing and underpins our capacity to make precise and reliable judgments about the relative location of objects around us. While these maps, at least in the visual system, support high precision judgments about the relative location of objects, they are prone to significant perceptual distortion. Here, we ask observers to estimate the separation of two visual stimuliVa spatial interval discrimination task. We show that large stimulus sizes require much greater separation in order to be perceived as having the same separation as small stimulus sizes. The relationship is linear, task independent, and unrelated to the perceived position of object edges. We also show that this type of spatial distortion is not restricted to the object itself but can also be revealed by changing the spatial scale of the background, while object size remains constant. These results indicate that fundamental spatial properties, such as retinal image size or the scale at which an object is analyzed, exert a marked influence on spatial coding.
Vision Research, 2008
This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are
Image processing analysis of traditional Gestalt vision experiments
Proceedings of SPIE, 2002
In the late 19th century, the Gestalt Psychology rebelled against the popular new science of Psychophysics. The Gestalt revolution used many fascinating visual examples to illustrate that the whole is greater than the sum of all the parts. Color constancy was an important example. The physical interpretation of sensations and their quantification by JNDs and Weber fractions were met with innumerable examples in which two "identical" physical stimuli did not look the same. The fact that large changes in the color of the illumination failed to change color appearance in real scenes demanded something more than quantifying the psychophysical response of a single pixel. The debate continues today with proponents of both physical, pixel-based colorimetry and perceptual, image-based cognitive interpretations. Modern instrumentation has made colorimetric pixel measurement universal. As well, new examples of unconscious inference continue to be reported in the literature. 1 Image processing provides a new way of analyzing familiar Gestalt displays. Since the pioneering experiments by Fergus Campbell 2 and Land 3 , we know that human vision has independent spatial and color channels. Color matching data from color constancy experiments agrees with spatial comparison analysis. 4 In this analysis, simple spatial processes can explain the different appearances of "identical" stimuli by analyzing the multiresolution spatial properties of their surrounds. Benary's Cross 5 , White's Effect 5 , the Checkerboard Illusion 6 and the Dungeon Illusion can all be understood by the analysis of their low-spatial-frequency components. Just as with color constancy, these Gestalt images are most simply described by the analysis of spatial components. Simple spatial mechanisms account for the appearance of "identical" stimuli in complex scenes. It does not require complex, cognitive processes to calculate appearances in familiar Gestalt experiments.
A Failure of the Proximity Principle in the Perception of Motion
2011
Gestalttheorie. Instead, attention is one major topic in cognitive psychology; in some sense, one may say that the cognitive revolution began just by putting this concept in the centre of the interest of experimental psychologists. But is it true that attention is missing in Gestalt theorising? Van Leeuwen and colleagues persuasively argue that this concept can be appropriately reconceptualised in the terms of figure-ground articulation, a matter, on which Gestalt psychology gave the most valuable contributions. Sergei Gepshtein, Ivan Tyukin, and Michael Kubovy focus their attention on one principle of perceptual organisation, the proximity principle. They convincingly demonstrate that this principle, invoked by many authors as a possible candidate for a single unifying factor, does not generalise to dynamic scenes, for no spatiotemporal proximity principle governs the perception of motion. Instead, two characteristics of the visual systems, that is, the intrinsic limitations of visual measurements and the constraints on the number of measurements that the visual systems can perform concurrently, can explain the perceptual results where the proximity principle fails. In the last paper, Raymond Pavlovski shows how Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) can reproduce typical Gestalt properties of the visual system. In this case we have an inversion of perspective: Pavlovski does not try to investigate the compliance of Gestalt principles to experimental results, but starting from the simulation he argues that the mathematical category modelling RNN describes both perceptual gestalt and large-scale neural network states. We are aware that the contributions herein gathered offer only a limited glimpse on what Gestalt psychology is able to say to contemporary psychology. Nevertheless, we hope that they sufficiently demonstrate that Gestalt psychology is not just a chapter of a textbook about the history of psychology.