Seeing what’s possible: Disconnected visual ‘parts’ are confused for their potential ‘wholes’

Abstract

Perception research traditionally investigates how actual states of the world are seen-how we perceive the shapes, colors, and locations that objects actually have. By contrast, everyday life provokes us to consider possible states of the world that have not yet (and may not ever) actually obtain. When assembling furniture or completing a jigsaw puzzle, for example, we may appreciate not only the particular shapes of individual objects but also their potential to combine into new objects with distinct shapes of their own. What is the nature of this experience? Here, we explore how visual processing extracts not only what objects are but also what they could become. In 7 experiments inspired by the puzzle game Tetris, subjects responded to a particular target within a stream of distracting tetrominoes; surprisingly, subjects false-alarmed more often to pairs of tetrominoes that could create their target than to pairs of tetrominoes that couldn't-essentially confusing possible objects for real ones. This pattern held for several types of objects and transformations, could not be explained by various forms of response bias, and persisted even when shape information was completely incidental to the task. We suggest that possible states of the world are not only contemplated in deliberate reflection but also automatically represented by more basic mechanisms of perception and attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).