Perceptual grouping

Perceptual grouping refers to the phenomenon that the visual system combines visual elements to form a new percept. The study of perceptual grouping has a long history in psychology since the days of Gestalt Psychologie. Our research on perceptual grouping has been focused on the neurophysiological basis of this phenomenon. More specifically, we used both fMRI and VEP to measure the brain activation to stimuli that produce a grouped percept. We currently focused on the contour integration phenomenon and Glass patterns though some projects involved more complicate phenomenon such as grouping of character components in reading Chinese words.

Figure 1. (a) and (b) are glass patterns.

Figure 2. Orientation tuning of contour integration. The visibility of the circle decreases with orientation jitter: (a) 0o, (b) 15o, (c) 30o and (d) 45o.