Abstract
Behavioral and neural evidence indicates that the organization of the visual field into figures (i.e., objects) and their local grounds is not a simple, early, stage of processing, as traditional theories supposed. Instead, figure/object detection entails competition between different interpretations that might be seen. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss behavioral evidence that multiple interpretations compete in the classic demonstration that convexity is a figural prior. In the second part, I will present neural evidence of suppression in the BOLD response to the groundside of objects when a portion of a familiar configuration was suggested there but lost the competition for perception. These results begin to elucidate the complex interactions between local and global, high- and low-level factors involved in perceptually organizing the visual field into objects and backgrounds.