Abstract
The perception of a visual stimulus is dependent not only upon local features, but also on the arrangement of those features. When stimulus features are perceptually well organized (e.g., symmetric or parallel), a global configuration with a high degree of salience emerges from the interactions between these features, often referred to as emergent features. Emergent features can be demonstrated in the Configural Superiority Effect (CSE): presenting a stimulus within an organized context relative to its presentation in a disarranged one results in better performance. Prior neuroimaging work on the perception of emergent features regards the CSE as an “all or none” phenomenon, focusing on the contrast between configural and non-configural stimuli. However, it is still not clear how emergent features are processed between these two endpoints. The current study examined the extent to which behavioral and neuroimaging markers of emergent features are responsive to the degree of configurality in visual displays. Subjects were tasked with reporting the anomalous quadrant in a visual search task while being scanned. Degree of configurality was manipulated by incrementally varying the rotational angle of low-level features within the stimulus arrays. Behaviorally, we observed faster response times with increasing levels of configurality. These behavioral changes were accompanied by increases in response magnitude across multiple visual areas in occipito-temporal cortex, primarily early visual cortex and object-selective cortex. Our findings suggest that the neural correlates of emergent features can be observed even in response to stimuli that are not fully configural, and demonstrate that configural information is already present at early stages of the visual hierarchy.
Highlights
One of the more well-known ideas to emerge from Gestalt psychology is that the whole is different than the sum of its parts (Koffka, 1935; Wagemans et al, 2012)
We measured the neural responses to the above set of stimuli, focusing on regions along the ventral visual pathway that have been previously shown to support configural processing (e.g., Chechlacz et al, 2015; Ward and Chun, 2015). This enabled us to determine the extent to which the Configural Superiority Effect (CSE) is manifest along the visual hierarchy; we investigated whether CSE reflects activation across multiple levels of the visual hierarchy (e.g., Altmann et al, 2003; Ban et al, 2006; Chechlacz et al, 2015), or whether it is supported by specific high-level areas in occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) (e.g., Lerner et al, 2001; Kubilius et al, 2011)
In order to determine how early along the ventral visual pathway configurality emerges, we examined how our parametrical manipulation of the relations between visual features impacted the magnitude of activation in EVC and higher-level visual
Summary
One of the more well-known ideas to emerge from Gestalt psychology is that the whole is different than the sum of its parts (Koffka, 1935; Wagemans et al, 2012). A closely related phenomenon has been referred to as emergent features: the subjective perception of a visual stimulus is dependent upon the local features and on the joint co-occurrence and arrangement of those features (e.g., Pomerantz et al, 1977). Neuroimaging Investigation of Emergent Features emerges from the interactions between local features. When these emergent features correspond to task demands behavioral performance improves dramatically (e.g., Pomerantz, 1986). Emergent features have been found to play a key role in visual display design (Bennett and Flach, 1992), as they provide powerful tools for decision-making by effectively leveraging the natural perceptual skills of human observers (Woods, 1991). If a display has been designed successfully the salient emergent features will represent meaningful properties and relationships within complex work domains, a notion critical in the ecological approach to display design (e.g., Bennett and Flach, 2011)
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