Visual Perception of Spatial Structure

人们看到的几乎每一个物体在视觉上都是不完整的，因为它至少有一部分被它自己的可见表面和/或更近的物体的表面所掩盖。这个项目将研究人们的视觉系统是如何完成这项任务的。这项研究将采用“启动匹配范式”，在这个范式中，人们在看到最初的“启动”显示，描绘了一个部分隐藏在视线之外的人物后不久，就会尽可能快地匹配两个人物的身体身份。这个任务中对不同形状的反应时间模式可以用来推断人们是如何完成启动显示中隐藏物体的图像的。结果应该有助于回答关于视觉完成过程的问题，以及关于该过程如何随时间展开的限制性理论。这些问题包括：(1)完成过程需要多长时间？(2)对象完成的“完整”程度如何？(3)物体的纹理、颜色和形状都完成了吗？(4)什么因素影响形状的完成方式？这种方法可以扩展到与视觉感知有关的其他重要问题，例如人们如何看到场景的深度以及他们如何感知物体的透明度。

Almost every object one sees is visually incomplete in the sense that at least part of it is hidden from view by its own visible surfaces and/or by those of closer objects. This project will study how people's visual systems accomplish this task. The research will employ the "primed matching paradigm", in which people match two figures, as quickly as possible, for physical identity shortly after seeing an initial "priming" display that depicts a figure partly hidden from view. The pattern of response times to different shapes in this task can then be used to infer how people have completed the image of the hidden object in the priming display. The results should be useful in answering questions about the process of visual completion and in constraining theories about how that process unfolds in time. Such questions include the following: (1) How long does the completion process take? (2) How "completely" are objects completed? (3) Are the texture and color of the object completed as well as its shape? (4) What factors influence the way that shapes are completed? This methodology can be extended to questions concerning other important problems of visual perception, such as how people see depth in scenes and how they perceive the transparency of objects.