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Article Dans Une Revue Frontiers in Psychology Année : 2017

Editorial: Perceptual Grouping-The State of The Art

Résumé

Perceptual neuroscience has identified mechanisms of perceptual grouping which account for the ways in which visual sensitivity to ordered structure and regularities expresses itself, in behavior and in the brain. The need to actively construct order, notably representations of objects in depth, is mandated as soon as visual signals reach the retina, given the occlusion of retinal signals by retinal veins and other retinal elements or blur. Multiple stages of neural processing transform fragmented signals into visual key representations of 3D scenes that can be used to control effective behaviors. Since our survival depends on our abilities to pick up order in the physical world, and since we conceive the physical world as an ordered one, our perception of it must somehow be sensitive to order. The articles from this collection illustrate how texture dissimilarity, boundary completion, surface filling-in, and figure-ground segregation generate perceptual order. Structural regularities are required for a visual texture to be discriminated from random noise by human observers, as shown in https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00734 , where Katkov, Harris and Sagi compare the performance of human observers to those of an Ideal Observer and an Order Observer model. The Order Observer model, based on the capture of statistical regularities in textures, is shown to closely reflect the sensitivity of the human visual system. Spatiotemporal boundary formation is critical to the perception of shape boundaries and global motion https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00910, as shown here by Erlikhman and Kellman, who demonstrate boundary integration from spatially and temporally sparse transformations of texture. The visual system uses positions and times of element transformations to extract local structural regularities such as edge fragments, which then connect by interpolation processes to produce larger shapes with a spatiotemporal integration constraint of ~80 23 ms between elements. Structural ambiguity and uncertainty pose a specific problem here. Perceptual grouping not only accounts for the ways in which physically defined order is processed by the visual system, but also how such order may be inferred in cases of uncertainty, and how this may give rise to the perception of "illusory" or " phantom " shapes. Roncato, Guidi, Parlangeli and Battaglini discuss a new phenomenon https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00959 in which illusory streaks irradiate from the vertexes of angular contours, connecting pairs of figures and forming phantom net 29 shapes that are only clearly visible in a specific figural context, as discussed here in the light of several theories of object contour detection. The real world conditions or configurative order to which perceptual grouping is sensitive also determine our aesthetic perception, as shown already elsewhere in a large body of previous work on aesthetic preferences for structural regularities. Here, Pinna, Porcheddu and Deiana https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01051 discuss a novel variant of perceptual grouping called accentuation for perceptual coupling. New conditions for grouping that cannot be explained in terms of the classical Gestalt principles (similarity etc) are shown. This new work reveals the supremacy of dissimilarity as an important figural complement to similarity in the genesis of aesthetic structure, involving novel dynamics of perceptual grouping they call coupling. The visual system organizes incoming information early on and interprets a 2D image in terms of the real world, producing configurative order that provides perceptual continuity and enables object-based attention. In https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02054 Grossberg reviews the Form-And-Color-And-DEpth (FACADE) model and its laminar cortical embodiment and extension by the 3D LAMINART models. These have explained, simulated, and predicted many perceptual and neurobiological data about how the visual cortex carries out 3D vision and figure-ground perception, and how these cortical mechanisms generate 3D percepts from 2D pictures of occluding and occluded objects. The models provide a unified explanation of neurophysiological data about cortical area V2 cells reported in a remarkable series of articles from the von der Heydt laboratory.
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hal-01455558 , version 1 (10-02-2017)

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Birgitta Dresp, Stephen Grossberg, Adam Reeves. Editorial: Perceptual Grouping-The State of The Art. Frontiers in Psychology, 2017, ⟨10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00067⟩. ⟨hal-01455558⟩
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