Gestalts at threshold could reveal Gestalts as predictions

Autor: Johan Wagemans, Thiago Leiros Costa
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Science
media_common.quotation_subject
REVERSE HIERARCHIES
behavioral disciplines and activities
Article
050105 experimental psychology
Stimulus (psychology)
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Psychometric function
CONTRAST SENSITIVITY
Psychophysics
medicine
Psychology
Contrast (vision)
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Object vision
RECOGNITION CONTRIBUTIONS
media_common
PERCEPTION
Science & Technology
Multidisciplinary
05 social sciences
FROM-MOTION
Object (philosophy)
Multidisciplinary Sciences
body regions
PRIMARY VISUAL-CORTEX
VISION
Visual cortex
medicine.anatomical_structure
Science & Technology - Other Topics
Medicine
Gestalt psychology
CONFIGURAL-SUPERIORITY
SIMPLICITY
Visual system
Percept
EMERGENT FEATURES
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Cognitive psychology
Zdroj: Scientific Reports, Vol 11, Iss 1, Pp 1-14 (2021)
Scientific Reports
ISSN: 2045-2322
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-97878-0
Popis: We review and revisit the predictive processing inspired "Gestalts as predictions" hypothesis. The study of Gestalt phenomena at and below threshold can help clarify the role of higher-order object selective areas and feedback connections in mid-level vision. In two psychophysical experiments assessing manipulations of contrast and configurality we showed that: (1) Gestalt phenomena are robust against saliency manipulations across the psychometric function even below threshold (with the accuracy gains and higher saliency associated with Gestalts being present even around chance performance); and (2) peak differences between Gestalt and control conditions happened around the time where responses to Gestalts are starting to saturate (mimicking the differential contrast response profile of striate vs. extra-striate visual neurons). In addition, Gestalts are associated with steeper psychometric functions in all experiments. We propose that these results reflect the differential engagement of object-selective areas in Gestalt phenomena and of information- or percept-based processing, as opposed to energy- or stimulus-based processing, more generally. In addition, the presence of nonlinearities in the psychometric functions suggest differential top-down modulation of the early visual cortex. We treat this as a proof of principle study, illustrating that classic psychophysics can help assess possible involvement of hierarchical predictive processing in Gestalt phenomena. ispartof: SCIENTIFIC REPORTS vol:11 issue:1 ispartof: location:England status: published
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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