Lecture notes Perceptual Organisation

L7- Perceptual organisation

What is perceptual organisation?
 What we perceive
- Coherent objects, events, scenes

 What this is built of
- Bits + pieces i.e. features (edges, blobs, orientations, motion, colour etc)

 Perceptual organisation is the process by which visual features are combined
(structured, organised) into meaningful wholes

What would the world look like without perceptual organisation?
 We wouldn’t see coherent objects, events + scenes
- Our visual experience would lack structure

 Perception without organisation is ‘piecemeal’
- A ‘snowstorm’ of visual input (features)
- Continuously changing as we move our eyes

The problem of organisation
 Retinal input is anything like what we subjectively perceive:
- An array of neural signals from photoreceptors
- Rapidly changing as we move our eyes

 The challenge is to find structure in this array of signals

Grouping principles
 Gestalt psychologists experimented with varying simple dimensions of groups of
elementary elements + literally see how it changed the first impression (perception)
- Which elements are seen as ‘going together’?

 Laws of grouping- Wertheimer

Some principles of grouping