The role of remote closure in the perception of occlusion at junctions and illusory contours

Orientation Contrast and Entropy Contrast in the Genesis of Subjective Contours along Thin Lines

Subjective contours are widely considered to be an aspect of the perception of occlusion, but considerations of occlusion do not always drive predictions of their strength. Occluding surfaces have no necessary relationship to the contours they occlude, yet it is commonly predicted that subjective contours will be strongest for inducer alignments that are orthogonal to inducer orientations. In several papers we have proposed that a lack of relationship between inducers and their alignment promotes seeing subjective contours. We explore this further here using horizontal or near-horizontal thin-line inducers arranged vertically with linearly aligned terminations along central gaps. Subjective contour strength was measured using the method of paired comparison in two experiments. The weakest subjective contours were found when the gap was orthogonal to the inducers and parallel to the outer edges of the line set. Subjective contours were strengthened by orientation contrast, defined either as a nonorthogonal relationship between the gap and the inducers or as nonparallelism between the gap and the outer alignments of the inducers. The effect was replicated at both high and low line densities. We also confirmed a strong effect of high inducer entropy ( variations in inducer orientation and separation) with thin-line inducers. The results support the view that the lack of a relationship of alignments to what is aligned is a major determinant of subjective contour strength.

Subjective contours along truncated letters

The truncation of upper-case words can result in a subjective contour along the truncated ends of the letters. We explored this effect in two experiments designed to tease apart the processes responsible: in particular, the possible role of letter recognition. Such a role would indicate an unprecedented involvement of "high-level vision" in the genesis of subjective contours. In experiment 1, we confirmed the basic effect of word truncation in eliciting a subjective contour, using only letters where truncation does not eliminate any critical features. In experiment 2, we showed that the effect is not confined to words/letters but is equally strong for controlled non-letter stimuli that, like words, have many forms that have an inflection or an intersection near the centre. Truncation at one end then introduces proportional imbalance between upper and lower sections of the figures. We conclude from the two experiments that part of the effect is due to vertical shortening per se and the rest to the proportional imbalance introduced by the truncation. The effect of proportional imbalance, a novel determinant of subjective contours, may result from experience with letters, although the effect is not "high level" in requiring the recognition of specific letters.