Department of Experimental Psychology, Eleanor Rathbone Building, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZA, UK.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2013 Apr;20(2):191-207. doi: 10.3758/s13423-012-0347-2.
Interest in convexity has a long history in vision science. For smooth contours in an image, it is possible to code regions of positive (convex) and negative (concave) curvature, and this provides useful information about solid shape. We review a large body of evidence on the role of this information in perception of shape and in attention. This includes evidence from behavioral, neurophysiological, imaging, and developmental studies. A review is necessary to analyze the evidence on how convexity affects (1) separation between figure and ground, (2) part structure, and (3) attention allocation. Despite some broad agreement on the importance of convexity in these areas, there is a lack of consensus on the interpretation of specific claims--for example, on the contribution of convexity to metric depth and on the automatic directing of attention to convexities or to concavities. The focus is on convexity and concavity along a 2-D contour, not convexity and concavity in 3-D, but the important link between the two is discussed. We conclude that there is good evidence for the role of convexity information in figure-ground organization and in parsing, but other, more specific claims are not (yet) well supported.
人们对凸性的兴趣在视觉科学中由来已久。对于图像中的平滑轮廓，可以对正（凸）曲率和负（凹）曲率区域进行编码，这为实体形状提供了有用的信息。我们回顾了大量关于该信息在形状感知和注意力中的作用的证据。这包括来自行为、神经生理学、成像和发展研究的证据。有必要进行综述，以分析凸性如何影响（1）图形和背景之间的分离，（2）部分结构，以及（3）注意力分配。尽管人们对凸性在这些领域的重要性达成了一些广泛的共识，但对于特定主张的解释仍存在分歧——例如，关于凸性对度量深度的贡献，以及关于注意力自动指向凸性或凹性的主张。重点是二维轮廓上的凸性和凹性，而不是三维中的凸性和凹性，但讨论了两者之间的重要联系。我们的结论是，有很好的证据表明凸性信息在图形-背景组织和分割中起作用，但其他更具体的主张尚未得到很好的支持。
