Kim Sung-Ho
Department of Psychology, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea.
Cognition. 2020 Feb;195:104132. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104132. Epub 2019 Nov 11.
Visual holes (cutouts in a surface) have recently intrigued vision scientists as interesting and useful stimuli in the studies of shape perception and as a perceptual conundrum regarding figure/ground organization. Adopting the Bouba/Kiki paradigm, this study addressed a controversial issue of whether the perceived shape of a closed region alters when the region changes from a solid object to an empty hole, in a more direct manner than previous studies did. Observers were presented with two doughnut-like cardboard cutouts, one with a flower-shaped hole and the other with a star-shaped hole, and then matched them with two nonsense words. The curvature profile of the hole boundary was manipulated so that the shape of the interior region (i.e., a hole) and that of the exterior region (i.e., material edges) give rise to opposite shape impressions (i.e., one rounded and the other spiky). The results of Experiment 1 revealed that shape-name matching for holed objects is based on the interior shapes of holes, but not those of materially defined inner edges. The following three experiments replicated the same pattern of results even when holes appeared like oral apertures in animal character faces (Experiments 2-3) and when they were irregular, non-symmetric, and low in semantic association with familiar real-world objects (Experiment 4). Lastly, Experiment 5 showed that shape-name matching for "C"-shaped, negative-part stimuli is also interior-shape-based if the opening of the interior region is relatively small. These findings suggest that the interior shapes of holes are automatically accessible. I conclude with a discussion of my hypothesis that the only global-level, unitary shape representation of a bounded region of a single connected surface is that of the interior region for both objects and holes, imposing an important constraint in visual shape processing.
视觉孔洞（表面上的切口）最近引起了视觉科学家的兴趣，它在形状感知研究中是有趣且有用的刺激物，同时也是关于图形/背景组织的一个感知难题。本研究采用布巴/基基范式，以比以往研究更直接的方式探讨了一个有争议的问题：当一个封闭区域从实心物体变为空洞时，其感知形状是否会改变。研究人员向观察者展示了两个甜甜圈形状的硬纸板切口，一个有花形孔洞，另一个有星形孔洞，然后让他们将其与两个无意义的单词进行匹配。对孔洞边界的曲率轮廓进行了操控，使得内部区域（即孔洞）的形状和外部区域（即材料边缘）的形状产生相反的形状印象（即一个是圆形的，另一个是尖形的）。实验1的结果表明，有孔洞物体的形状名称匹配是基于孔洞的内部形状，而非由材料定义的内部边缘的形状。接下来的三个实验重复了相同的结果模式，即使孔洞出现在动物角色面部的口部开口处（实验2 - 3），以及当它们不规则、不对称且与熟悉的现实世界物体语义关联较低时（实验4）。最后，实验5表明，如果内部区域的开口相对较小，对于“C”形负形部分刺激的形状名称匹配也是基于内部形状的。这些发现表明孔洞的内部形状是自动可获取的。我最后讨论了我的假设，即对于单个连通表面的有界区域，唯一的全局层面、统一的形状表征是物体和孔洞的内部区域的形状表征，这在视觉形状处理中施加了一个重要的限制。
