Relationship between uniform connectedness and proximity in perceptual grouping  

作　　者：韩世辉 Glyn W.Humphreys 

机构地区：[1]Department of Psychology, Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China [2]Cognitive Science Research Center, School of Psychology,University of Birmingham, United Kingdom Correspondence should be addressed to Han Shihui

出　　处：《Science China(Life Sciences)》2003年第2期113-126,共14页中国科学（生命科学英文版）

基　　金：This study was supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 30225026); the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant No. 2002CCA01000); the Scientific Research Founda-tion of the Returned Oversea Chines

摘　　要：Palmer and Rock proposed that uniform connectedness (UC) occurs prior to classical Gestalt factors to define the primitive units for visual perception. Han, Humphreys and Chen, how-ever, found that grouping by proximity can take place as quickly as that based on UC in a letter discrimination task. The present study employed a letter detection task to examine the relationship between UC and proximity grouping in 3 experiments. We showed that reaction times to targets defined by proximity or UC were equally fast when one or two global objects were presented in the visual field. However, as the number of global objects was increased, responses were faster to targets defined by UC than to targets defined by proximity. In addition, the advantage of UC over proximity was not affected by the space between global objects. The results suggest that UC was more effective than proximity in forming perceptual units under multiple object conditions. Possible reasons for this finding are discussed.Palmer and Rock proposed that uniform connectedness (UC) occurs prior to classical Gestalt factors to define the primitive units for visual perception. Han, Humphreys and Chen, how-ever, found that grouping by proximity can take place as quickly as that based on UC in a letter discrimination task. The present study employed a letter detection task to examine the relationship between UC and proximity grouping in 3 experiments. We showed that reaction times to targets defined by proximity or UC were equally fast when one or two global objects were presented in the visual field. However, as the number of global objects was increased, responses were faster to targets defined by UC than to targets defined by proximity. In addition, the advantage of UC over proximity was not affected by the space between global objects. The results suggest that UC was more effective than proximity in forming perceptual units under multiple object conditions. Possible reasons for this finding are discussed.

关 键 词：perceptual grouping PROXIMITY SEGMENTATION SIMILARITY uniform connectedness. 1  Introduction 

分 类 号：Q42[生物学—神经生物学]