Impact of Topological Perception on Attention for Products Shape

Abstract

A primitive and general function of the visual system is the perception of global topological properties. People will give priority to attending the global topological properties of object compared with the local geometric properties. The purpose of this paper is to verify whether topological properties perception is applicable to product recognition. If the topological properties variation occurs in the shape of the product, the product will get much attention, and the product will have the opportunity to be aware of the innovations that cannot be felt by the vision, such as function, experience, and so on. Therefore, topological properties perception is helpful to product innovation. Therefore, this study hypothesized that the perception of topological properties (holes, connectivity, and inside/outside) exists in the shapes of the products, and human can pay attention to the products that are relational to the variation of topological transformation occurred in the shapes. From the experiment of bicycles recognition, we ascertain people will pay attention to the bicycles with the topological properties variation. Repertory grid technique can find out the reasons for attention and distinguish them. We extracted the mental constructs of the participants for the products with topological variation and identified the reason of visual attention.