From illusory contours to faces: A first step in relating foundational characteristics of perceptual organization

Abstract

Last year (Bittner et al., VSS 2007), we presented a series of experiments demonstrating that hierarchical forms containing illusory contours could produce dimensional consistency effects. These effects were accompanied by the presence of both perceptual and decisional influences evidenced by violations of perceptual and decisional separability. The current experiments extend this work in two ways. Experiment 1 is an analysis of the previous hierarchial forms with all physical dimensions present. These analyses allow for a comparision with the original results between the physical presence and absence of dimensions. Experiment 2 is a comparison of face-like and object-like hierarchical stimuli. These analyses start a progression of studies to bridge the fields of object and facial perception. Hypotheses in this work are that (a) perceptual organization relies as much or more at the level above physical similarity; (b) perceptual organization reflects both perceptual and decisional factors; and (c) perceptual organization of forms and faces reflect a common strategy.