Department of Cognitive Biology, Otto von Guericke Universitaet.
Department of Experimental Neurophysiology.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2010 Dec;36(6):1443-1459. doi: 10.1037/a0020248.
The visual system groups image elements that belong to an object and segregates them from other objects and the background. Important cues for this grouping process are the Gestalt criteria, and most theories propose that these are applied in parallel across the visual scene. Here, we find that Gestalt grouping can indeed occur in parallel in some situations, but we demonstrate that there are also situations where Gestalt grouping becomes serial. We observe substantial time delays when image elements have to be grouped indirectly through a chain of local groupings. We call this chaining process incremental grouping and demonstrate that it can occur for only a single object at a time. We suggest that incremental grouping requires the gradual spread of object-based attention so that eventually all the object's parts become grouped explicitly by an attentional labeling process. Our findings inspire a new incremental grouping theory that relates the parallel, local grouping process to feedforward processing and the serial, incremental grouping process to recurrent processing in the visual cortex.
视觉系统将属于一个物体的图像元素组合在一起，并将它们与其他物体和背景区分开来。这种分组过程的重要线索是格式塔准则，大多数理论都提出这些准则是在整个视觉场景中并行应用的。在这里，我们发现格式塔分组确实可以在某些情况下并行发生，但我们也证明了在某些情况下，分组会变成串行的。当图像元素必须通过一系列局部分组间接分组时，我们观察到了大量的时间延迟。我们将这个连锁过程称为增量分组，并证明它一次只能处理一个对象。我们认为，增量分组需要逐渐扩展基于对象的注意力，以便最终所有对象的部分都通过注意力标记过程明确分组。我们的发现启发了一种新的增量分组理论，该理论将并行的局部分组过程与前馈处理相关联，将串行的增量分组过程与视觉皮层中的递归处理相关联。
