The Psychology of Perceptual Organization: A Transformational Approach

Abstract

Psychological research on perceptual organization is reviewed, and a theoretical framework is presented to account for it. The review focusses on the organizational phenomena of shape constancy, motion perception, figural goodness, perceptual grouping, and reference frame effects. It is argued that the key to understanding them within a unified framework lies in the concept of local invariance over the group of Euclidean similarity transformations. The theory offered to account for these phenomena is based on a parallel processing system constructed from many spatial analyzers that are related to each other by similarity transformations. They are compared for output equivalence by invariance analyzers and structured more globally by frame analyzers. The latter are used to select the maximally informative (i.e., simplest) organization of sensory data for further processing and shape description.