Specific Gestalt principles cannot explain (un)crowding

Frontiers in Computer Science

Computer Science

Oh-Hyeon Choung¹  Michael H. Herzog¹  Einat Rashal²  Marina Kunchulia³ 

[1] Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;School of Psychology, Keele University, Staffordshire, United Kingdom;Vision Research Laboratory, Beritashvili Centre of Experimental Biomedicine, Tbilisi, Georgia;Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences, Free University of Tbilisi, Tbilisi, Georgia;

关键词: visual perception;    perceptual organization;    Gestalt principle;    crowding;    grouping;    vision model;    recurrent processing;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fcomp.2023.1154957

 received in 2023-01-31, accepted in 2023-08-28,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The standard physiological model has serious problems accounting for many aspects of vision, particularly when stimulus configurations become slightly more complex than the ones classically used, e.g., configurations of Gabors rather than only one or a few Gabors. For example, as shown in many publications, crowding cannot be explained with most models crafted in the spirit of the physiological approach. In crowding, a target is neighbored by flanking elements, which impair target discrimination. However, when more flankers are added, performance can improve for certain flanker configurations (uncrowding), which cannot be explained by classic models. As was shown, aspects of perceptual organization play a crucial role in uncrowding. For this reason, we tested here whether known principles of perceptual organization can explain crowding and uncrowding. The answer is negative. As shown with subjective tests, whereas grouping is indeed key in uncrowding, the four Gestalt principles examined here did not provide a clear explanation to this effect, as variability in performance was found between and within categories of configurations. We discuss the philosophical foundations of both the physiological and the classic Gestalt approaches and sketch a way to a happy marriage between the two.

【 授权许可】

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Copyright © 2023 Choung, Rashal, Kunchulia and Herzog.