visual perception psychology research paper

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A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: I. Perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization

Affiliation.

1 University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Tiensestraat 102, Box 3711, BE-3000 Leuven, Belgium. [email protected]
PMID: 22845751
PMCID: PMC3482144
DOI: 10.1037/a0029333

In 1912, Max Wertheimer published his paper on phi motion, widely recognized as the start of Gestalt psychology. Because of its continued relevance in modern psychology, this centennial anniversary is an excellent opportunity to take stock of what Gestalt psychology has offered and how it has changed since its inception. We first introduce the key findings and ideas in the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology, and then briefly sketch its development, rise, and fall. Next, we discuss its empirical and conceptual problems, and indicate how they are addressed in contemporary research on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. In particular, we review the principles of grouping, both classical (e.g., proximity, similarity, common fate, good continuation, closure, symmetry, parallelism) and new (e.g., synchrony, common region, element and uniform connectedness), and their role in contour integration and completion. We then review classic and new image-based principles of figure-ground organization, how it is influenced by past experience and attention, and how it relates to shape and depth perception. After an integrated review of the neural mechanisms involved in contour grouping, border ownership, and figure-ground perception, we conclude by evaluating what modern vision science has offered compared to traditional Gestalt psychology, whether we can speak of a Gestalt revival, and where the remaining limitations and challenges lie. A better integration of this research tradition with the rest of vision science requires further progress regarding the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which is the focus of a second review article.

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Illustration of several grouping principles…

Illustration of several grouping principles (adapted from Palmer, 2002a).

(A) Defining features of a…

(A) Defining features of a dot lattice stimulus. (B) Two-dimensional space and nomenclature…

Two dimotif rectangular dot lattices…

Two dimotif rectangular dot lattices with | b | | a | =…

Two grouping indifference curves. The…

Two grouping indifference curves. The abscissa, δ a , represents the difference in…

The pure distance law (adapted…

The pure distance law (adapted from Kubovy et al., 1998, with permission).

The conjoined effects of proximity…

The conjoined effects of proximity and similarity are additive. The dashed lines in…

(A) The affinity function. (B)…

(A) The affinity function. (B) The objecthood functions.

A six-stroke motion lattice. (A)…

A six-stroke motion lattice. (A) The successive frames are superimposed in space. Gray…

Object boundaries project to the…

Object boundaries project to the image as fragmented contours, due to occlusions (dashed…

Example of stimuli devised by…

Example of stimuli devised by Field et al. (1993) to probe the role…

Models of good continuation. (A)…

Models of good continuation. (A) Cocircularity support neighborhood (adapted from Parent & Zucker,…

(A) Amodal completion of the…

(A) Amodal completion of the black shape behind the gray shape. (B) A…

Two curved fragments are seen…

Two curved fragments are seen to complete amodally behind the gray rectangle in…

(A) Measuring extrapolation of curvature…

(A) Measuring extrapolation of curvature by (B) asking observers to position and orient…

Contour geometry depends on surface…

Contour geometry depends on surface geometry. The same curved contour segment (A) can…

Example of a display used…

Example of a display used in classic tests of whether or not convexity…

(A–B) Sample stimuli used by…

(A–B) Sample stimuli used by Peterson et al. (1991). The configural factors of…

Sample displays used by Driver…

Sample displays used by Driver and Baylis (1996), adapted with permission. (A). Study…

When a wiggly curved line…

When a wiggly curved line is drawn on a circular disc, the two…

The role of part salience…

The role of part salience in figure-ground organization (adapted from Hoffman & Singh,…

In a configuration with four…

In a configuration with four black pacmen, an illusory white square emerges in…

(a) A quasi-random collection of…

(a) A quasi-random collection of quasi-random shapes. (b) The same shapes as in…

The isolated square (a) and…

The isolated square (a) and the squares with rounded corners (b) appear as…

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Review Article
Published: 05 August 2019

The human imagination: the cognitive neuroscience of visual mental imagery

Joel Pearson ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3704-5037 1

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 20 , pages 624–634 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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Object vision
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Working memory

Mental imagery can be advantageous, unnecessary and even clinically disruptive. With methodological constraints now overcome, research has shown that visual imagery involves a network of brain areas from the frontal cortex to sensory areas, overlapping with the default mode network, and can function much like a weak version of afferent perception. Imagery vividness and strength range from completely absent (aphantasia) to photo-like (hyperphantasia). Both the anatomy and function of the primary visual cortex are related to visual imagery. The use of imagery as a tool has been linked to many compound cognitive processes and imagery plays both symptomatic and mechanistic roles in neurological and mental disorders and treatments.

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visual perception psychology research paper

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks R. Keogh, R. Koenig-Robert and A. Dawes for helpful feedback and discussion on this paper. This paper, and some of the work discussed in it, was supported by Australian National Health and Medical Research Council grants APP1024800, APP1046198 and APP1085404, a Career Development Fellowship APP1049596 and an Australian Research Council discovery project grant DP140101560.

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Magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging decoding methods that are constrained by or based on individual voxel responses to perception, which are then used to decode imagery.

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Visual Perception Based on Gestalt Theory

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Zhiyuan Ye 19 ,
Chenqi Xue 19 &
Yun Lin 19

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Gestalt psychology puts forward the laws of similarity, proximity and common destiny. These laws all point out that visual stimuli work together to form a similar pattern organization, which results in the visual elements conforming to the same rules to be regarded as a group by the observer. However, the attributes of visual elements are now more diverse, including the dynamic changes of visual elements. In this paper, based on Bertin’s five visual variables, we will explore the impact of the coordinated changes of these visual variables on human visual perception. The experiment produced the ranking of visual variables on the strength of grouping ability. In practical application, the relative grouping strength of these visual elements has high application value for interface design and data visualization research.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported jointly by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71871056, 71471037).

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Ye, Z., Xue, C., Lin, Y. (2021). Visual Perception Based on Gestalt Theory. In: Russo, D., Ahram, T., Karwowski, W., Di Bucchianico, G., Taiar, R. (eds) Intelligent Human Systems Integration 2021. IHSI 2021. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1322. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68017-6_118

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Seeing What You Feel: Affect Drives Visual Perception of Structurally Neutral Faces

Erika h. siegel.

1 Department of Health Psychology, University of California, San Francisco

Jolie B. Wormwood

2 Department of Psychology, Northeastern University

Karen S. Quigley

3 Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital, Bedford, Massachusetts

Lisa Feldman Barrett

4 Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts

5 Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

Associated Data

Affective realism, the phenomenon whereby affect is integrated into an individual’s experience of the world, is a normal consequence of how the brain processes sensory information from the external world in the context of sensations from the body. In the present investigation, we provided compelling empirical evidence that affective realism involves changes in visual perception (i.e., affect changes how participants see neutral stimuli). In two studies, we used an interocular suppression technique, continuous flash suppression, to present affective images outside of participants’ conscious awareness. We demonstrated that seen neutral faces are perceived as more smiling when paired with unseen affectively positive stimuli. Study 2 also demonstrated that seen neutral faces are perceived as more scowling when paired with unseen affectively negative stimuli. These findings have implications for real-world situations and challenge beliefs that affect is a distinct psychological phenomenon that can be separated from cognition and perception.

Affective realism refers to the idea that affective feelings help to construct your experience of the world ( Anderson, Siegel, White, & Barrett, 2012 ; Barrett & Bar, 2009 ). Feelings do more than influence judgments of what you have seen; they influence the actual content of perception. Affective realism is consistent with neuroscientific evidence that the brain constructs experience by using past experience (i.e., memory) to anticipate sensory inputs and that these signals are corrected by sensory information from the world ( Barrett, 2017 ; Chanes & Barrett, 2016 ; Clark, 2013 ). From this perspective, called predictive coding ( Clark, 2013 ), active inference ( Friston, 2010 ), or belief propagation ( Deneve & Jardri, 2016 ), perceptions derive from the brain’s “predictions” about the causes of sensory events, based on past experience, with incoming sensory input, prediction error , serving to check those predictions. Anatomic, physiologic, and metabolic evidence ( Chanes & Barrett, 2016 ; Kleckner et al., 2017 ) indicates that we do not see the world veridically, with cognition and emotion biasing perception in a top-down fashion. Instead, we see it as we predict it to be (i.e., consistent with our internal model of the body in the world), with sensory inputs confirming or adjusting that internal model.

Neuroscientific and behavioral studies suggest that affective feelings are integral to the brain’s internal model and, thus, perception. The cytoarchitecture of limbic regions puts affective feelings at the top of the brain’s predictive hierarchy, driving predictions throughout the brain as information cascades to primary sensory and motor regions ( Barbas, 2015 ; Barrett & Simmons, 2015 ; Chanes & Barrett, 2016 ). These same regions control allostasis, the process of coordinating resources across physiologic systems to regulate metabolic energy ( Kleckner et al., 2017 ), and the resulting internal sensations, called interoception ( Craig, 2015 ). As a consequence, interoceptive sensations and their low-dimensional representations ( Barrett, 2017 ; Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009 ) are at the core of the brain’s internal model ( Barrett, 2017 ; Chanes & Barrett, 2016 ; Craig, 2015 ) and, therefore, perception. The predictive structure of the brain and the driving role of limbic cortices help explain why affective properties of valence (pleasantness to unpleasantness) and arousal ( Barrett & Russell, 1999 ) are basic features of consciousness, akin to loudness and brightness ( Damasio, 1999 ; James, 1890/2007 ). Affect is not unique to instances of emotion but is present in every conscious moment, including during perceptions of the outside world.

In this article, we show that affective realism changes how people see one another, literally. We used an interocular suppression technique, continuous flash suppression (CFS; Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005 ), in which a neutral face is presented to one eye at full contrast while an affective face is presented to the other eye at low contrast. The neutral face is consciously perceived, whereas the affective face is suppressed from awareness but processed nonetheless. Research using CFS has revealed that affective information presented outside of awareness changes first impressions of neutral faces ( Anderson et al., 2012 ). We demonstrated that affective realism extends beyond broad social judgments to the visual perception of neutral faces: Individuals perceive structurally neutral faces as more smiling or scowling when paired with unconscious, affective information.

Participants

Participants were undergraduate students recruited from Northeastern University with normal or corrected-to-normal vision without glasses. Forty-five participants (30 females, 15 males; age: M = 19.07 years, SD = 1.30) completed the experiment for credit toward the completion of their introductory psychology course. Sample size was determined by conducting a power analysis in G*Power ( Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007 ) using effect sizes from previous research in our laboratory that employed a similar experimental task ( Anderson et al., 2012 , Study 4). This power analysis revealed that for an effect size (η 2 ) of 0.1 to be detected (80% chance) with significance at the 5% level, a sample of at least 40 participants would be required. Two participants were removed prior to analyses because of problems with calibrating the stereoscope during their experimental session, leaving a final sample of 43 participants.

Stimuli and apparatus

Instructions and stimuli were presented using E-Prime (Version 2; Schneider, Eschman, & Zuccolotto, 2012 ). Each participant viewed stimuli through a mirror stereoscope, a visual device that uses mirrors to simultaneously present different images, one to each eye, while leaning his or her chin and forehead on the rests of the device.

Stimuli included photographs of houses used for the contrast adjustment task, described below, and a series of high-contrast Mondrian-type images similar to those used by Tsuchiya and Koch (2005) that were “flashed” during CFS trials (an example trial can be seen in Fig. 1 ).

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Object name is 10.1177_0956797617741718-fig1.jpg

Trial structure for face perception task.

Additional stimuli included images of faces with smiling, scowling, and neutral expressions that were pulled from a normed set of facial stimuli developed in our laboratory (IASLab Face Set; http://www.affective-science.org/face-set.shtml ). Images of faces had no visible teeth and were cropped to 150 (width) by 169 (height) pixels at 100 dpi. From these face images, we generated an additional set of morphed facial stimuli for use in response scales during the face perception task. The morphed facial stimuli represented a blend of affective expressions (i.e., smile and neutral expressions and scowl and neutral expressions). Using Abrosoft Fantamorph software (www.fantamorph.com), we morphed images of the same person displaying a neutral expression and smiling and displaying a neutral expression and scowling. Still images were selected at 20% smile (80% neutral), 10% smile (90% neutral), 10% scowl (90% neutral), and 20% scowl (80% neutral). Sample morphed facial stimuli can be seen in Figure 2 . All stimuli were presented in gray scale on a 19-in. monitor.

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Sample response screen. Participants indicated which of the five faces they just saw from a set of five faces that varied from slightly scowling to slightly smiling (1 = 20% scowl, 2 = 10% scowl, 3 = neutral, 4 = 10% smile, 5 = 20% smile).

Contrast adjustment task

We first established eye dominance for each participant using the hole-in-the-card test ( Dolman, 1919 ) because suppression of images under CFS is more easily achieved when images are presented to the nondominant eye. Participants then completed a contrast adjustment task, during which the contrast level of images presented to the nondominant eye under CFS was adjusted to improve suppression on an individual basis. Each trial of the contrast adjustment task lasted 1,200 ms. On a given trial, participants were presented with a fixation point to both eyes for 500 ms. Then, the dominant eye was presented with six Mondrian-type images for 100 ms each; the alternating pattern of Mondrian images helped achieve CFS ( Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005 ). Concurrently, the nondominant eye was presented with an empty frame for 100 ms and then with a low-contrast, low-luminance image of a house (either right-side up or upside down) for 200 ms. An empty frame was then presented in the nondominant eye for the remaining 300 ms. Following this sequence, a backward mask was presented to both eyes for 500 ms. Participants reported the orientation (upside down or right-side up) of the suppressed house image on each trial by clicking one of two keys on the keyboard. Participants also rated their subjective awareness of the suppressed house using the 4-point Perceptual Awareness Scale ( Ramsøy & Overgaard, 2004 ), from 1, no experience , to 4, absolutely clear experience . Images of houses were presented at four discrete contrast levels, created by reducing the contrast and luminance levels of the original photographs to 75%, 50%, 25%, and 12.5%. For the first 20 trials of this task, all house images were presented at 75% contrast with half of the trials containing right-side-up images and half containing upside-down images. If any participant correctly guessed the orientation of the suppressed house on 70% of the trials or reported “no experience” on less than 75% of trials, the contrast level was reduced, and the participant completed another 20 trials of this task at the next lowest contrast level. This procedure was repeated until the participant correctly guessed the orientation on 13 or fewer trials and reported “no experience” on at least 15 trials, or until the 12.5% contrast level was reached. The contrast adjustment task determined the individualized contrast level at which all suppressed images would be presented for the remainder of the experimental tasks for each participant.

Face perception task

See Figure 1 for a visual representation of the trial structure for the face perception task. On each trial of the face perception task, perceivers were presented with a fixation point to both eyes for 500 ms. Following this, the dominant eye was presented with a Mondrian-type image for 100 ms, a face displaying a neutral facial expression (the target face) for 100 ms, another Mondrian-type image for 100 ms, the target face for 100 ms, and then a final Mondrian image for 100 ms. The alternating pattern of the target face and Mondrian images helped to achieve CFS. Concurrently, the nondominant eye was presented with an empty frame for 100 ms and then with a low-contrast, low-luminance face for 200 ms (the suppressed affective face); faces were smiling, were scowling, or displayed a neutral expression. Suppressed affective faces were the opposite gender of the target face. An empty frame was presented in the nondominant eye for the remaining 300 ms. Following this sequence, a backward mask was presented to both eyes for 500 ms.

We used 18 unique neutral target-face identities (9 male, 9 female), and each was matched with a unique identity of the opposite gender (to serve as a paired suppressed face). These identity pairings were consistent across all participants. The facial configurations portrayed by each suppressed identity (i.e., smiling, scowling, neutral) were counterbalanced, however, across participants (i.e., for all participants, Male A, posing a neutral expression, was paired with Female A, but Female A was smiling for some participants and scowling for others, etc.). For each participant, 6 of the suppressed identities (3 male, 3 female) portrayed each of the three expressions (i.e., smiling, scowling, neutral), and the expression of a given suppressed identity did not change throughout the course of the experimental session. For each participant, each neutral target and suppressed affective face pairing was shown 10 times. This resulted in a total of 180 trials (6 neutral target faces × 3 suppressed affective expression conditions × 10 repetitions). The task was divided into two blocks of 90 trials each, and participants were given a 2-minute break to rest their eyes between blocks.

At the conclusion of each trial, following the 500-ms backward mask, participants made two ratings on a standard keyboard. First, they indicated the gender of the face they saw by choosing “male,” “female,” or “don’t know.” They were instructed to choose “don’t know” if they had trouble determining the gender, saw more than one gender or face, or saw a blend of two genders or faces. Because the suppressed face was always the opposite gender of the seen neutral target face, this gender question was used as a trial-by-trial measure of subjective awareness of the suppressed face. All trials in which the suppressed face “broke through” the suppression effect to reach subjective awareness (i.e., where the participant selected the gender of the suppressed face or the “don’t know” option) were excluded from analyses (7.24% of all trials). Thus, we excluded every trial in which participants reported any subjective awareness of another face, not just those in which participants selected the gender of the suppressed face. Participants then completed a perceptual matching task ( Witt & Proffitt, 2005 ), in which they identified the image that best matched their perception of the neutral target face. To do this, they were shown a set of five faces and asked to select which of the five faces they saw on that trial (see Fig. 2 ). All five images were of the seen neutral target face from the trial. However, the faces varied slightly in expression from 20% scowling to neutral to 20% smiling (see details on creation of morphed images in the Stimuli and Apparatus section). For analyses, images were numbered such that lower numbers indicated more scowling and higher numbers indicated more smiling (i.e., 1 = 20% scowl, 2 = 10% scowl, 3 = neutral, 4 = 10% smile, 5 = 20% smile).

Each participant was greeted by a research assistant who confirmed that the participant had normal or corrected-to-normal vision without glasses. The participants then received a brief verbal description of the experiment and provided informed consent. Next, participants provided demographic information, including gender, race, age, and handedness. The researcher assessed the participant’s eye dominance and led the participant into an individual testing room with a computer and a mirror stereoscope. The researcher instructed the participant to sit with his or her head positioned on the chin and forehead rests of the stereoscope. The research assistant calibrated each participant to the stereoscope, adjusting the mirrors and rests as needed so that the stimuli being presented were aligned with the participant’s eyes. Before each of the experimental tasks, the researcher read instructions and watched while the participant completed five practice trials. The researcher left the participant alone in the testing room with the lights off while he or she completed each task. Participants first completed the contrast adjustment task and then the face perception task. At the end of the experimental session, researchers administered a debriefing questionnaire assessing participants’ awareness of the suppressed stimuli and the purpose of the experiment, as well as their comprehension of task instructions. They were then debriefed about the nature of the study and remunerated for their participation.

As predicted, a repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant effect of the suppressed affective stimuli on the visual perception of the seen neutral faces, F (2, 42) = 9.72, p < .001, η 2 = .32, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [0.08, 0.48] (see Fig. 3 ). The data were also examined by estimating a Bayes factor using Bayesian information criteria ( Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, & van der Maas, 2011 ), comparing the fit of the data under the null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis. A two-sided Bayesian repeated measures ANOVA (with a default Cauchy prior width of r = .707) revealed a Bayes factor (BF 10 ) of 62.9, indicating that the observed data are 62.9 times more likely under the alternative hypothesis (that suppressed affective information will influence perception) than under the null hypothesis. A Bayes factor of 62.9 is considered very strong evidence in favor of our hypothesis.

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Object name is 10.1177_0956797617741718-fig3.jpg

Violin plots showing mean ratings of seen expressions by suppressed-affective-information condition in Study 1. Individual dots represent each participant’s mean rating for each face type. Rectangular boxes represent the interquartile range of the distribution, with the line in the middle representing the mean. Density of the violin plots represents the density of the data at each value, with wider sections indicating higher density. Error bars represent ±2 SD . Lower ratings for seen expressions correspond to more intensely scowling morphs, whereas higher ratings correspond to more intensely smiling morphs.

Post hoc analyses revealed that seen neutral faces were perceived as having a more smiling expression when paired with a suppressed affectively positive stimulus ( M = 3.18, SD = 0.33, 95% CI = [3.08, 3.28]) than when paired with either a suppressed affectively neutral stimulus ( M = 3.08, SD = 0.28, 95% CI = [3.00, 3.16]), p = .03, or a suppressed affectively negative stimulus ( M = 3.01, SD = 0.30, 95% CI = [2.92, 3.10]), p < .001. Neutral faces were, in turn, perceived as having a more smiling expression when paired with a suppressed affectively neutral stimulus than a suppressed affectively negative stimulus, p = .04. There were no differences in reaction time across the affective conditions, nor were there any differences in the number of breakthrough trials across affective conditions (during which participants reported conscious awareness of smiling, scowling, and neutral faces at similar rates), F s < 1.04.

Study 2 replicated Study 1 but included an additional objective detection task (detecting a stimulus behaviorally, regardless of subjective awareness; Cheesman & Merikle, 1984 ). When coupled with the trial-by-trial measure, this provided a more robust, converging assessment of awareness.

Seventy-one participants (41 females, 29 males, 1 nonresponse; age: M = 23.56 years, SD = 8.09) were recruited from Northeastern University and the surrounding Boston community who had normal or corrected-to-normal vision without glasses. Sample size was determined on the basis of a power analysis calculated for Study 1, adjusted to accommodate expected data exclusions due to better-than-chance performance on the objective awareness task ( Anderson et al., 2012 ). Participants either received credit toward the completion of their introductory psychology course requirements or received $5 per half hour of participation. Prior to analyses, we removed 4 participants who reported completing other experiments in the laboratory that used CFS. One additional participant was removed from analyses because of problems with calibrating the stereoscope during the experimental session, leaving a final sample of 66 participants.

Materials, tasks, and procedure

Materials and tasks in Study 2 were identical to those of Study 1, except that an additional task was completed at the end of the experiment as a second measure of awareness of the suppressed affective faces (to complement the trial-by-trial measure of awareness used in Study 1). With the exception of this additional task, the procedure was identical across Studies 1 and 2.

Objective awareness task

Trials in the objective awareness task were nearly identical to the experimental trials in the face perception task except that (a) suppressed affective faces were presented upside down on half of the trials, and (b) a scrambled image of a face (which was no longer identifiable as a face) was presented to the dominant eye (instead of a neutral target face). Participants completed 72 trials of this task; we presented each of the 18 unique suppressed affective faces from the face perception task four times, twice right-side up and twice upside down (rotated 180°). These suppressed affective faces were presented at the same contrast level as used in the face perception task for each participant. At the conclusion of each trial, participants were asked to guess the orientation of the face (upside down or right-side up) and then to rate the quality of their visual experience on the same 4-point Perceptual Awareness Scale ( Ramsøy & Overgaard, 2004 ) used during the contrast adjustment task. If images presented to the nondominant eye were not successfully suppressed throughout the experiment, participants should have some conscious awareness of the faces and should report the correct orientation of the suppressed affective faces at better-than-chance level during this objective awareness task.

Eighteen of the 66 participants were able to correctly guess the orientation of the suppressed face on 62.5% or more of the trials (better than chance, p < .05, two-tailed). These participants were excluded from all further analyses ( n = 48). Moreover, in Study 2, we again excluded individual trials of the face perception task on which breakthrough may have occurred: 10.78% of all face perception trials were removed prior to analyses because participants failed to accurately report the gender of the seen neutral target face.

Replicating Study 1, a repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant effect of suppressed affective stimuli on the visual perception of the seen neutral faces, F (2, 47) = 3.62, p = .03, η 2 = .07, 95% CI = [0.00, 0.18] (see Fig. 4 ). A two-sided Bayesian repeated measures ANOVA revealed a BF 10 of 1.4, indicating that the observed data are 1.4 times more likely under the alternative hypothesis (that suppressed affective information will influence perception) than under the null hypothesis. Whereas a Bayes factor of 1.4 is considered anecdotal evidence in favor of our hypothesis, these findings directly replicate those of Experiment 1 (which had a Bayes factor considered “very strong” evidence in favor of our hypothesis) and do so even with the implementation of highly conservative inclusion criteria based on the robust, converging assessments of awareness used in Experiment 2.

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Violin plots showing mean ratings of seen expressions by suppressed-affective-information condition in Study 2. Individual dots represent each participant’s mean rating for each face type. Rectangular boxes represent the interquartile range of the distribution, with the line in the middle representing the mean. Density of the violin plots represents the density of the data at each value, with wider sections indicating higher density. Error bars represent ±2 SD . Lower ratings for seen expressions correspond to more intensely scowling morphs, whereas higher ratings correspond to more intensely smiling morphs.

Post hoc analyses revealed that seen neutral faces were perceived as having a more smiling expression when paired with a suppressed affectively positive stimulus ( M = 3.10, SD = 0.38, 95% CI = [2.99, 3.21]) than when paired with either a suppressed affectively neutral stimulus ( M = 3.02, SD = 0.37, 95% CI = [2.92, 3.13]), p = .04, or a suppressed affectively negative stimulus ( M = 3.02, SD = 0.36, 95% CI = [2.92, 3.12]), p = .04. In this study, perceptions of seen neutral faces did not differ significantly when paired with a suppressed affectively neutral stimulus or a suppressed affectively negative stimulus, p = .97. Thus, the effect for negative stimuli was smaller in Study 2 than in Study 1, but in both studies, neutral faces were perceived as more smiling in trials with suppressed positive stimuli than in trials with suppressed negative stimuli. There were no differences in reaction time across the affective conditions, nor were there any differences in the number of breakthrough trials by suppressed affective condition (i.e., participants reported conscious awareness of smiling, scowling, and neutral faces at similar rates), F s < 1.69.

General Discussion

Affective realism provides a novel framework for understanding affective misattribution effects ( Clore, Gasper, & Garvin, 2001 ) and represents a critical extension of work on the role of affect in perception, which has largely focused on lower-level perceptual effects, such as sensitivity for contrast gradients and global versus local feature processing (for a review, see Zadra & Clore, 2011 ). To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate the role of affect in the perception of complex percepts that carry social meaning. The two studies reported here demonstrate that visual percepts are infused with affect. Previous research provided evidence that individuals experience neutral faces differently (i.e., as more likeable or trustworthy) depending on the affective feelings accompanying those faces ( Anderson et al., 2012 ). Our data add to this literature, suggesting that individuals perceive faces differently depending on their affective feelings.

There is debate about whether perceptual matching tasks (such as ours) measure perception or memory ( Philbeck & Witt, 2015 ), but accumulating empirical evidence indicates that the boundary between perception and memory is more phenomenological than physically real (see Fan, Hutchinson, & Turk-Browne, 2016 ). Visual perception and visual memory are associated with the same neural substrates and rely on shared processes ( Slotnick & Schacter, 2004 ; Ungerleider, 1995 ). Predictive coding approaches provide further support by suggesting that perceptions are memories, constrained and corrected by sensory inputs from the outside world ( Barrett, 2017 ; Clark, 2013 ; Summerfield et al., 2006 ). What a person consciously sees in the moment is a mental representation of the real world, not a direct reflection of it. In our studies, incidental affect was perceived as a property of seen faces in the same way that red is perceived as a property of a rose.

The present studies highlight several important avenues for future research. First, assessing participants’ confidence in their perceptual experience might offer insight into whether affective realism involves modulations in perceptual precision, particularly as affect has been shown to influence confidence ratings in other perceptual modalities ( Allen et al., 2016 ). Future research should explore affective realism across different levels of awareness while exploring the extent of neural processing (e.g., Jiang & He, 2006 ). Furthermore, using affective stimuli other than faces (e.g., snakes) may also speak to the robustness of affective realism.

That we perceive others differently depending on how we feel may have important real-world implications. For instance, the affective-realism hypothesis may help to explain why police officers perceive targets as more or less threatening depending on the interoceptive information they receive ( Azevedo, Garfinkel, Critchley, & Tsakiris, 2017 ). Research on affective realism stands to fundamentally alter our understanding of how perception influences decision making in real-world scenarios where errors can have costly, potentially deadly, consequences.

Supplementary Material

Action Editor: Alice O’Toole served as action editor for this article.

Author Contributions: E. H. Siegel and J. B. Wormwood contributed equally to this study. All authors contributed to the study concept and design. Data were collected and analyzed by E. H. Siegel and J. B. Wormwood under the supervision of K. S. Quigley and L. F. Barrett. E. H. Siegel and J. B. Wormwood drafted the manuscript, and K. S. Quigley and L. F. Barrett provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Funding: This research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (Grant W5J9CQ-12-C-0049 to L. F. Barrett and Grant W911N-16-1-0191 to K. S. Quigley and J. B. Wormwood) and a National Institute of Mental Health T32 grant (MH019391) to E. H. Siegel. The views, opinions, and findings contained in this article are those of the authors and shall not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy, or decision, unless so designated by other documents.

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All data have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at osf.io/ht3gk. The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797617741718 . This article has received the badge for Open Data. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/badges .

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Visual Perception Theory In Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

What is Visual Perception?

To receive information from the environment, we are equipped with sense organs, e.g., the eye, ear, and nose. Each sense organ is part of a sensory system that receives sensory inputs and transmits sensory information to the brain.

A particular problem for psychologists is explaining how the physical energy received by sense organs forms the basis of perceptual experience. Sensory inputs are somehow converted into perceptions of desks and computers, flowers and buildings, cars and planes, into sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch experiences.

A major theoretical issue on which psychologists are divided is the extent to which perception relies directly on the information present in the environment. Some argue that perceptual processes are not direct but depend on the perceiver’s expectations and previous knowledge as well as the information available in the stimulus itself.

This controversy is discussed with respect to Gibson (1966), who has proposed a direct theory of perception which is a “bottom-up” theory, and Gregory (1970), who has proposed a constructivist (indirect) theory of perception which is a “top-down” theory.

Psychologists distinguish between two types of processes in perception: bottom-up processing and top-down processing .

Bottom-up processing is also known as data-driven processing because perception begins with the stimulus itself. Processing is carried out in one direction from the retina to the visual cortex, with each successive stage in the visual pathway carrying out an ever more complex analysis of the input.

Top-down processing refers to the use of contextual information in pattern recognition. For example, understanding difficult handwriting is easier when reading complete sentences than reading single and isolated words. This is because the meaning of the surrounding words provides a context to aid understanding.

Gregory (1970) and Top-Down Processing Theory

what is top-down processing in visual perception

Psychologist Richard Gregory (1970) argued that perception is a constructive process that relies on top-down processing.

Stimulus information from our environment is frequently ambiguous, so to interpret it, we require higher cognitive information either from past experiences or stored knowledge in order to make inferences about what we perceive. Helmholtz called it the ‘likelihood principle’.

For Gregory, perception is a hypothesis which is based on prior knowledge. In this way, we are actively constructing our perception of reality based on our environment and stored information.

A lot of information reaches the eye, but much is lost by the time it reaches the brain (Gregory estimates about 90% is lost).
Therefore, the brain has to guess what a person sees based on past experiences. We actively construct our perception of reality.
Richard Gregory proposed that perception involves a lot of hypothesis testing to make sense of the information presented to the sense organs.
Our perceptions of the world are hypotheses based on past experiences and stored information.
Sensory receptors receive information from the environment, which is then combined with previously stored information about the world which we have built up as a result of experience.
The formation of incorrect hypotheses will lead to errors of perception (e.g., visual illusions like the Necker cube).

Supporting Evidence

There seems to be an overwhelming need to reconstruct the face, similar to Helmholtz’s description of “unconscious inference.” An assumption based on past experience.

Perceptions can be ambiguous

The Necker cube is a good example of this. When you stare at the crosses on the cube, the orientation can suddenly change or “flip.”

It becomes unstable, and a single physical pattern can produce two perceptions.

Gregory argued that this object appears to flip between orientations because the brain develops two equally plausible hypotheses and is unable to decide between them.

When the perception changes though there is no change in the sensory input, the change of appearance cannot be due to bottom-up processing. It must be set downwards by the prevailing perceptual hypothesis of what is near and what is far.

Perception allows behavior to be generally appropriate to non-sensed object characteristics.

Critical Evaluation of Gregory’s Theory

1. the nature of perceptual hypotheses.

If perceptions make use of hypothesis testing, the question can be asked, “what kind of hypotheses are they?” Scientists modify a hypothesis according to the support they find for it, so are we, as perceivers, also able to modify our hypotheses? In some cases, it would seem the answer is yes. For example, look at the figure below:

This probably looks like a random arrangement of black shapes. In fact, there is a hidden face in there; can you see it? The face is looking straight ahead and is in the top half of the picture in the center. Now can you see it? The figure is strongly lit from the side and has long hair and a beard.

Once the face is discovered, very rapid perceptual learning takes place and the ambiguous picture now obviously contains a face each time we look at it. We have learned to perceive the stimulus in a different way.

Although in some cases, as in the ambiguous face picture, there is a direct relationship between modifying hypotheses and perception, in other cases, this is not so evident. For example, illusions persist even when we have full knowledge of them (e.g., the inverted face, Gregory 1974).

One would expect that the knowledge we have learned (from, say, touching the face and confirming that it is not “normal”) would modify our hypotheses in an adaptive manner. The current hypothesis testing theories cannot explain this lack of a relationship between learning and perception.

2. Perceptual Development

A perplexing question for the constructivists who propose perception is essentially top-down in nature is “how can the neonate ever perceive?” If we all have to construct our own worlds based on past experiences, why are our perceptions so similar, even across cultures? Relying on individual constructs for making sense of the world makes perception a very individual and chancy process.

The constructivist approach stresses the role of knowledge in perception and therefore is against the nativist approach to perceptual development.

However, a substantial body of evidence has been accrued favoring the nativist approach. For example, Newborn infants show shape constancy (Slater & Morison, 1985); they prefer their mother’s voice to other voices (De Casper & Fifer, 1980); and it has been established that they prefer normal features to scrambled features as early as 5 minutes after birth.

3. Sensory Evidence

Perhaps the major criticism of the constructivists is that they have underestimated the richness of sensory evidence available to perceivers in the real world (as opposed to the laboratory, where much of the constructivists” evidence has come from).

Constructivists like Gregory frequently use the example of size constancy to support their explanations. That is, we correctly perceive the size of an object even though the retinal image of an object shrinks as the object recedes. They propose that sensory evidence from other sources must be available for us to be able to do this.

However, in the real world, retinal images are rarely seen in isolation (as is possible in the laboratory). There is a rich array of sensory information, including other objects, background, the distant horizon, and movement. This rich source of sensory information is important to the second approach to explaining perception that we will examine, namely the direct approach to perception as proposed by Gibson.

Gibson argues strongly against the idea that perception involves top-down processing and criticizes Gregory’s discussion of visual illusions on the grounds that they are artificial examples and not images found in our normal visual environments.

This is crucial because Gregory accepts that misperceptions are the exception rather than the norm. Illusions may be interesting phenomena, but they might not be that information about the debate.

Gibson (1966) and Bottom-Up Processing

Gibson’s bottom-up theory suggests that perception involves innate mechanisms forged by evolution and that no learning is required. This suggests that perception is necessary for survival – without perception, we would live in a very dangerous environment.

Our ancestors would have needed perception to escape from harmful predators, suggesting perception is evolutionary.

James Gibson (1966) argues that perception is direct and not subject to hypothesis testing, as Gregory proposed. There is enough information in our environment to make sense of the world in a direct way.

His theory is sometimes known as the ‘Ecological Theory’ because of the claim that perception can be explained solely in terms of the environment.

For Gibson: the sensation is perception: what you see is what you get. There is no need for processing (interpretation) as the information we receive about size, shape, distance, etc., is sufficiently detailed for us to interact directly with the environment.

Gibson (1972) argued that perception is a bottom-up process, which means that sensory information is analyzed in one direction: from simple analysis of raw sensory data to the ever-increasing complexity of analysis through the visual system.

what is bottom-up processing in visual perception

Features of Gibson’s Theory

The optic array.

Perception involves ‘picking up’ the rich information provided by the optic array in a direct way with little/no processing involved.

Because of movement and different intensities of light shining in different directions, it is an ever-changing source of sensory information. Therefore, if you move, the structure of the optic array changes.

According to Gibson, we have the mechanisms to interpret this unstable sensory input, meaning we experience a stable and meaningful view of the world.

Changes in the flow of the optic array contain important information about what type of movement is taking place. The flow of the optic array will either move from or towards a particular point.

If the flow appears to be coming from the point, it means you are moving towards it. If the optic array is moving towards the point, you are moving away from it.

Invariant Features

the optic array contains invariant information that remains constant as the observer moves. Invariants are aspects of the environment that don’t change. They supply us with crucial information.

Two good examples of invariants are texture and linear perspective.

Another invariant is the horizon-ratio relation. The ratio above and below the horizon is constant for objects of the same size standing on the same ground.

OPTICAL ARRAY : The patterns of light that reach the eye from the environment.

RELATIVE BRIGHTNESS : Objects with brighter, clearer images are perceived as closer

TEXTURE GRADIENT : The grain of texture gets smaller as the object recedes. Gives the impression of surfaces receding into the distance.

RELATIVE SIZE : When an object moves further away from the eye, the image gets smaller. Objects with smaller images are seen as more distant.

SUPERIMPOSITION : If the image of one object blocks the image of another, the first object is seen as closer.

HEIGHT IN THE VISUAL FIELD : Objects further away are generally higher in the visual field

Evaluation of Gibson’s (1966) Direct Theory of Perception

Gibson’s theory is a highly ecologically valid theory as it puts perception back into the real world.

A large number of applications can be applied in terms of his theory, e.g., training pilots, runway markings, and road markings.

It’s an excellent explanation for perception when viewing conditions are clear. Gibson’s theory also highlights the richness of information in an optic array and provides an account of perception in animals, babies, and humans.

His theory is reductionist as it seeks to explain perception solely in terms of the environment. There is strong evidence to show that the brain and long-term memory can influence perception. In this case, it could be said that Gregory’s theory is far more plausible.

Gibson’s theory also only supports one side of the nature-nurture debate, that being the nature side. Again, Gregory’s theory is far more plausible as it suggests that what we see with our eyes is not enough, and we use knowledge already stored in our brains, supporting both sides of the debate.

Visual Illusions

Gibson’s emphasis on DIRECT perception provides an explanation for the (generally) fast and accurate perception of the environment. However, his theory cannot explain why perceptions are sometimes inaccurate, e.g., in illusions.

He claimed the illusions used in experimental work constituted extremely artificial perceptual situations unlikely to be encountered in the real world, however, this dismissal cannot realistically be applied to all illusions.

For example, Gibson’s theory cannot account for perceptual errors like the general tendency for people to overestimate vertical extents relative to horizontal ones.

Neither can Gibson’s theory explain naturally occurring illusions. For example, if you stare for some time at a waterfall and then transfer your gaze to a stationary object, the object appears to move in the opposite direction.

Bottom-up or Top-down Processing?

Neither direct nor constructivist theories of perception seem capable of explaining all perceptions all of the time.

Gibson’s theory appears to be based on perceivers operating under ideal viewing conditions, where stimulus information is plentiful and is available for a suitable length of time. Constructivist theories, like Gregory”s, have typically involved viewing under less-than-ideal conditions.

Research by Tulving et al. manipulated both the clarity of the stimulus input and the impact of the perceptual context in a word identification task. As the clarity of the stimulus (through exposure duration) and the amount of context increased, so did the likelihood of correct identification.

However, as the exposure duration increased, so the impact of context was reduced, suggesting that if stimulus information is high, then the need to use other sources of information is reduced.

One theory that explains how top-down and bottom-up processes may be seen as interacting with each other to produce the best interpretation of the stimulus was proposed by Neisser (1976) – known as the “Perceptual Cycle.”

DeCasper, A. J., & Fifer, W. P. (1980). Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers” voices . Science , 208(4448), 1174-1176.

Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gibson, J. J. (1972). A Theory of Direct Visual Perception. In J. Royce, W. Rozenboom (Eds.). The Psychology of Knowing . New York: Gordon & Breach.

Gregory, R. (1970). The Intelligent Eye . London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Gregory, R. (1974). Concepts and Mechanisms of Perception . London: Duckworth.

Necker, L. (1832). LXI. Observations on some remarkable optical phenomena seen in Switzerland; and on an optical phenomenon which occurs on viewing a figure of a crystal or geometrical solid . The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 1 (5), 329-337.

Slater, A., Morison, V., Somers, M., Mattock, A., Brown, E., & Taylor, D. (1990). Newborn and older infants” perception of partly occluded objects. Infant behavior and Development , 13(1), 33-49.

Further Information

Trichromatic Theory of Color Vision

Held and Hein (1963) Movement-Produced Stimulation in the Development of Visually Guided Behavior

What do visual illusions teach us?

Cognitive Psychology

Automatic Processing in Psychology: Definition & Examples

Controlled Processing in Psychology: Definition & Examples

How Ego Depletion Can Drain Your Willpower

What is the Default Mode Network?

Theories of Selective Attention in Psychology

Availability Heuristic and Decision Making

A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Psychology

Volume 74, 2023, review article, open access, the development of color perception and cognition.

John Maule 1 , Alice E. Skelton 1 , and Anna Franklin 1
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: The Sussex Colour Group & Baby Lab, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, United Kingdom; email: [email protected]
Vol. 74:87-111 (Volume publication date January 2023) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032720-040512
First published as a Review in Advance on August 16, 2022
Copyright © 2023 by the author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information

Color is a pervasive feature of our psychological experience, having a role in many aspects of human mind and behavior such as basic vision, scene perception, object recognition, aesthetics, and communication. Understanding how humans encode, perceive, talk about, and use color has been a major interdisciplinary effort. Here, we present the current state of knowledge on how color perception and cognition develop. We cover the development of various aspects of the psychological experience of color, ranging from low-level color vision to perceptual mechanisms such as color constancy to phenomena such as color naming and color preference. We also identify neurodiversity in the development of color perception and cognition and implications for clinical and educational contexts. We discuss the theoretical implications of the research for understanding mature color perception and cognition, for identifying the principles of perceptual and cognitive development, and for fostering a broader debate in the psychological sciences.

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Emotional design and validation study of human–landscape visual interaction.

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Ren, H.; Cheng, L.; Zhang, J.; Wang, Q.; Zhang, L. Emotional Design and Validation Study of Human–Landscape Visual Interaction. Buildings 2024 , 14 , 1966. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14071966

Ren H, Cheng L, Zhang J, Wang Q, Zhang L. Emotional Design and Validation Study of Human–Landscape Visual Interaction. Buildings . 2024; 14(7):1966. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14071966

Ren, Hongguo, Lu Cheng, Jing Zhang, Qingqin Wang, and Lujia Zhang. 2024. "Emotional Design and Validation Study of Human–Landscape Visual Interaction" Buildings 14, no. 7: 1966. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14071966

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A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception I. Perceptual Grouping and Figure-Ground Organization
1 Introduction. Exactly 100 years ago Wertheimer (1912) published his paper on phi motion—perception of pure motion, without object motion—which many consider to be the beginning of Gestalt psychology as an important school of thought. The present status of Gestalt psychology is ambiguous. On the one hand, many psychologists believe that the Gestalt school died with its founding fathers in ...
Form and Function in Information for Visual Perception
Abstract. Visual perception involves spatially and temporally coordinated variations in diverse physical systems: environmental surfaces and symbols, optical images, electro-chemical activity in neural networks, muscles, and bodily movements—each with a distinctly different material structure and energy. The fundamental problem in the theory ...
A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: I. Perceptual
A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: I. Perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization ... Max Wertheimer published his paper on phi motion, widely recognized as the start of Gestalt psychology. ... we discuss its empirical and conceptual problems, and indicate how they are addressed in contemporary research on perceptual ...
What visual perception tells us about mind and brain
Recent studies of visual perception have begun to reveal the connection between neuronal activity in the brain and conscious visual experience. ... Neuroscience research over the past 40 years has revealed that there are roughly 30 different visual areas in ... This paper is a summary of a session presented at the third annual Japanese ...
The human imagination: the cognitive neuroscience of visual mental
However, evidence from the past 100 years of behavioural research suggests that visual imagery can have a functional effect on sensory processing akin to a weak form of visual perception 3.
PDF A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: II. Conceptual
perception and the rest of psychology. In our first article on the occasion of 100 years of Gestalt psychology (Wagemans et al., 2012), we demonstrated how some of these shortcomings were already alleviated in more contemporary research, performed in the Gestalt spirit, on perceptual grouping and figure ground or-ganization.
Visual art history and the psychology of perception: Perspectivism and
Because this visual pattern is a to features of the environment taken in relation to the position of the perceiver, art historian Edgerton rightly states, "there is nothing in original perspectiva theory [i.e., natural perspective] that had anything to do with the visual arts" (p. 22).That is, we are not referring here to a technique for transforming the appearance of the environment onto ...
PDF A Survey of Perception-Based Visualization Studies by Task
perception and its incorporation to visualization are derived from psychology-related journals, such as the Journal of Vi-sion, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, and Psycho-nomic. With the survey's objective and the vast availability of perception-based papers, it was challenging to perform a comprehensive literature search.
Visual Perception
B.G. Breitmeyer, in Encyclopedia of Consciousness, 2009. Visual perception is the registration of stimuli in phenomenal consciousness. An unperceived stimulus can leave traces at unconscious levels of processing that can affect the visual perception and performance.
Visual Perception Based on Gestalt Theory
Visual cognition is an important perceptual component of human cognitive system used to express and understand the environment. As the most important sense organ, human visual system has evolved for millions of years, allowing human to recognize and track objects visually [ 3 ]. In Gestalt theory, the law of proximity refers to the perception ...
Different Mechanisms for Supporting Mental Imagery and Perceptual
Recent research suggests imagery is functionally equivalent to a weak form of visual perception. Here we report evidence across five independent experiments on adults that perception and imagery are supported by fundamentally different mechanisms: Whereas perceptual representations are largely formed via increases in excitatory activity, imagery representations are largely supported by ...
Visual Perception: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations
In book: Experimental Psychology. Volume 4 in Weiner IB (Editor-in-Chief) Handbook of Psychology (pp.85-119) Edition: 2e; Chapter: Visual Perception: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations
Vision
For this Special Issue on "Visual Perception and Its Neural Mechanisms", we invite a mixture of original and review articles that provide insight into the neural computations performed by visual cortex. We especially encourage articles that address issues pertaining to (i) advances in techniques for neural measurement or (ii) neural data ...
The Use of Virtual Reality in Psychology: A Case Study in Visual Perception
In this paper we provide a brief overview of the benefits and challenges associated with VR in psychology research and discuss its utility in relation to the examination of visual perception. The term VR is often used interchangeably to refer to one of three types of system: a virtual environment presented on a flat screen, a room-based system ...
Seeing What You Feel: Affect Drives Visual Perception of Structurally
Abstract. Affective realism, the phenomenon whereby affect is integrated into an individual's experience of the world, is a normal consequence of how the brain processes sensory information from the external world in the context of sensations from the body. In the present investigation, we provided compelling empirical evidence that affective ...
(PDF) Attention and Perception
The Psychology of Attention presents a systematic review of the main lines of research on attention; the topics range from perception of threshold stimuli to memory storage and decisionmaking.
Form and Function in Information for Visual Perception
Abstract. Visual perception involves spatially and temporally coordinated variations in diverse physical systems: environmental surfaces and symbols, optical images, electro-chemical activity in neural networks, muscles, and bodily movements—each with a distinctly different material structure and energy. The fundamental problem in the theory ...
Visual perception (Psychology) Research Papers
Since there is limited experimental research on colour perception within healing environments, this research paper considers only a handful of experimental studies that specifically focus on patient colour preference and the physiological effects of colour within patient rooms in healthcare facilities; a designed/controlled environment where ...
(PDF) A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception: I
In 1912, Max Wertheimer published his paper on phi motion, widely recognized as the start of Gestalt psychology. Because of its continued relevance in modern psychology, this centennial ...
Visual Perception Theory In Psychology
Summary. A lot of information reaches the eye, but much is lost by the time it reaches the brain (Gregory estimates about 90% is lost). Therefore, the brain has to guess what a person sees based on past experiences. We actively construct our perception of reality. Richard Gregory proposed that perception involves a lot of hypothesis testing to ...
(PDF) Learning from illusions: From perception studies ...
Learning from illusions: From perception studies to perspective-taking interventions. May 2023. Neuroscience Research 195 (8) May 2023. 195 (8) DOI: 10.1016/j.neures.2023.05.003. Authors: Francois ...
The Development of Color Perception and Cognition
Color is a pervasive feature of our psychological experience, having a role in many aspects of human mind and behavior such as basic vision, scene perception, object recognition, aesthetics, and communication. Understanding how humans encode, perceive, talk about, and use color has been a major interdisciplinary effort. Here, we present the current state of knowledge on how color perception ...
Visual perception Research Papers
Enhanced visual functioning in autism: An ALE meta-analysis. Autistics often exhibit enhanced perceptual abilities when engaged in visual search, visual discrimination, and embedded figure detection. In similar fashion, while performing a range of perceptual or cognitive tasks, autistics display... more. Download.
Emotional Design and Validation Study of Human-Landscape Visual Interaction
The formal beauty of "objects" is the main focus of modern rural landscapes, ignoring human interaction with the environment and the emotional reflection in this behavioral process. It is unable to satisfy the emotional needs of younger people who aspire to a high-quality life in the rural environment. The research idea of this paper is 'first assessment—then design—then validation ...

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Seeing What You Feel: Affect Drives Visual Perception of Structurally Neutral Faces

Jolie B. Wormwood

Karen S. Quigley

Lisa Feldman Barrett

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Visual Perception Theory In Psychology

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