The Time Course of Perceptual Closure of Incomplete Visual Objects: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Chenyang Liu,Changming Wang,Hongge Luo,Chao Chen,Zhiming Bian,Sha Sha,Lina Li,Xiaotian Wang,Xiujun Zhang,Lin Lu,Bin Hao,Abdelkader Nasreddine Belkacem

doi:10.1155/2020/8825197

Abstract

Perceptual organization is an important part of visual and auditory information processing. In the case of visual occlusion, whether the loss of information in images could be recovered and thus perceptually closed affects object recognition. In particular, many elderly subjects have defects in object recognition ability, which may be closely related to the abnormalities of perceptual functions. This phenomenon even can be observed in the early stage of dementia. Therefore, studying the neural mechanism of perceptual closure and its relationship with sensory and cognitive processing is important for understanding how the human brain recognizes objects, inspiring the development of neuromorphic intelligent algorithms of object recognition. In this study, a new experiment was designed to explore the realistic process of perceptual closure under occlusion and intact conditions of faces and building. The analysis of the differences in ERP components P1, N1, and Ncl indicated that the subjective awareness of perceptual closure mainly occurs in Ncl, but incomplete information has been processed and showed different manners compared to complete stimuli in N170 for facial materials. Although occluded, faces, but not buildings, still maintain the specificity of perceptual processing. The Ncl by faces and buildings did not show significant differences in both amplitude and latency, suggesting a “completing” process regardless of categorical features.

Highlights

In everyday life, visual objects are usually shaded and even occluded, making visual content inputs to human visual systems incomplete
In functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, lateral occipital complex (LOC) and posterior intraparietal region was found to be more activated by incomplete stimuli than complete stimuli in the perceptual closure task [4, 5]
Previous studies indicated that when people are viewing incomplete line drawings, a negative wave that starts at 220–230 ms and reaches a peak at 290–300 ms can be found mainly in the occipital or occipito-temporal lobe [15,16,17] and can be localized to the electrophysiological activities in LOC [18]. is negativity of closure (Ncl) component is believed to reflect the process of visual completion instead of visual representation, but it needs extensive exploration on different styles of stimulus before wide acceptance [19, 20]

Summary

Introduction

Visual objects are usually shaded and even occluded, making visual content inputs to human visual systems incomplete. Perceptual closure is a processing stage and reflects the completion result of incomplete information. When we see incomplete visual images, brain areas in the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes participate in the completing processes. In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, lateral occipital complex (LOC) and posterior intraparietal region was found to be more activated by incomplete stimuli than complete stimuli in the perceptual closure task [4, 5]. Previous studies indicated that when people are viewing incomplete line drawings, a negative wave that starts at 220–230 ms and reaches a peak at 290–300 ms can be found mainly in the occipital or occipito-temporal lobe [15,16,17] and can be localized to the electrophysiological activities in LOC [18]. All the efforts above could provide solid support when we are trying to reconstruct object recognition ability for elder people and to construct neural networks with human-like intelligence following the neural mechanisms of human visual systems

Methods

Results

Discussion

Ethical Approval