Perceptual grouping of object contours survives saccades.

Autor: Maarten Demeyer, Peter De Graef, Karl Verfaillie, Johan Wagemans
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2011
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 6, Iss 6, p e21257 (2011)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0021257
Popis: Human observers explore scenes by shifting their gaze from object to object. Before each eye movement, a peripheral glimpse of the next object to be fixated has however already been caught. Here we investigate whether the perceptual organization extracted from such a preview could guide the perceptual analysis of the same object during the next fixation. We observed that participants were indeed significantly faster at grouping together spatially separate elements into an object contour, when the same contour elements had also been grouped together in the peripheral preview display. Importantly, this facilitation occurred despite a change in the grouping cue defining the object contour (similarity versus collinearity). We conclude that an intermediate-level description of object shape persists in the visual system across gaze shifts, providing it with a robust basis for balancing efficiency and continuity during scene exploration.
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