The importance of the ground surface in perceiving the layout of 3D scenes was discussed approximately 1000 years ago in Alhazen's (
1989, translation) writings and more recently by Gibson (
1950) in his “ground theory.” Recent studies have examined the unique role of the ground surface in the perceptual organization of the 3D space by comparing it directly with other environmental surfaces, especially the ceiling surface. For example, Epstein (
1966) found that the “height in the picture” cue was less effective when a ceiling surface was presented as compared to when a ground surface was presented. McCarley and He (
2000,
2001) found that visual search was faster on an implicit ground surface than on an implicit ceiling surface defined by binocular disparity. Their finding was extended by Morita and Kumada (
2003) who showed superior visual search performance on a ground surface defined by pictorial cues. Champion and Warren (
2010) also obtained an advantage of the ground surface as compared to the ceiling surface in 3D size estimation. Bian et al. (
2005) found that when the ground surface and the ceiling surface provided conflicting information about the relative distance of objects in a scene, observers used the information on the ground surface to determine the layout of the scene. They referred to this result as the
ground dominance effect. In a follow-up study, Bian et al. (
2006) showed that the ground dominance effect was mainly due to the differences in the projections of ground and ceiling surfaces, with visual field location having a minor effect. Recent research has also found a ground dominance effect for older observers, although the magnitude of the effect was smaller than that found for younger observers (Bian & Andersen,
2008). Finally, using a change detection paradigm, Bian and Andersen (
2010) found that changes to a ground surface or objects on a ground surface were detected faster than changes to a ceiling surface or objects attached to a ceiling surface and that this advantage was mainly due to superior encoding, rather than retrieval and comparison, of ground surface information.