Amodal Completion Revisited

Abstract

Amodal completion (AC) is analyzed, by looking at its historical roots and persisting conceptual difficulties. Looking at the origin of the concept, it becomes clear that it is not equivalent to perception of occluded parts. The role of fragment incompleteness is discussed, to clarify that it cannot be taken as a necessary factor for eliciting AC. The standard view of AC, depicted as a set of processes that extrapolate from veridically represented image fragments, is evaluated and rejected on the basis of evidence that AC modifies also modal parts. The theoretical importance of AC phenomena and their potential to reveal the inner forces of perceptual organization are emphasized, with specific reference to the minimum principle. Instances in which AC might be expected but does not occur are examined, to define the limits of such an integrative process.

The illusion of absence: how a common feature of magic shows can explain a class of road accidents

“…A priori, it does indeed appear rather counter-intuitive to suggest the visual mechanism determine our experience of occluded “blind spots” in the world since whatever is hidden in them obviously does not produce any visual stimulation at all. A large body of research on the well-known phenomenon of amodal completion, however, strongly suggest that this is indeed the case (Ekroll et al, 2018a , b ; Ekroll et al, 2016 ; Gerbino, 2020 ; Kanizsa, 1985 ; Michotte et al, 1964 ; Scherzer & Faul, 2019 ; Scherzer & Ekroll, 2009 , 2012 , 2015 ; Shimojo & Nakayama, 1990 ; Van Lier & Gerbino, 2015 ). The bottom panels in Fig.…”

A Conceptual Playground Between Perception and Cognition: Introduction to the Special Issue on Amodal Completion

“…Because the perception of occluded scene regions involves quite an extreme level of stimulus incompleteness and ambiguity, it appears particularly well-suited for studying the rules and principles of perception. As Gerbino (2020) highlights in his historical review, paraphrasing Koffka’s (1935) original ideas, “perceptual completions (both modal and amodal) are key phenomena because they reveal inner forces of organization, when outer forces are weak or absent.” Perhaps most importantly, amodal completion challenges our naïve ideas about the distinction between seeing and thinking. Since amodal completion refers to mental experiences of occluded, and hence invisible regions in a visible scene, it appears odd to conceptualize it as seeing, yet these mental experiences tend to behave like visual impressions in many ways.…”

“…The present special issue provides a wealth of beautiful phenomena and experimental contributions involving amodal completion, using abstract stimuli to test Gestalt-like processing, both in static displays (Chen et al., 2018; Peta et al., 2019) and dynamic displays (Anstis, 2018; Nakajima et al., 2019; Tyler, 2019), or more complex stimuli, for example, using stereoscopic fusion (Tse, 2017a, 2017b) or human faces (Haberman & Ulrich, 2019), whereas other contributions highlight completion phenomena in a broad range of domains like art and design (Koenderink et al., 2018; van Lier & Ekroll, 2019), magic (Ekroll, De Bruyckere, et al., 2018), architecture (Ekroll, Mertens, et al., 2018), fashion (Kiritani et al., 2018), and even the history of astronomy (Roncato, 2019). Besides that, this special issue also comprises extensive conceptual reviews from different angles: perceptual psychology (Gerbino, 2020; Scherzer & Faul, 2019), philosophy (Nanay, 2018), and neurosciences (Thielen et al., 2019).…”

“…Critical notes and thoughtful insights on the nature of amodal completion are scattered throughout the aforementioned contributions, focusing on issues such as the distinction and commonalities between modal and amodal completion (e.g., Koenderink et al., 2018; Scherzer & Faul, 2019; Tse, 2017a, 2017b), the perception-cognition dichotomy (e.g., Ekroll, Mertens, et al., 2018; Gerbino, 2020; Nanay, 2018; Roncato, 2019; van Lier & Ekroll, 2019), or the nature of the underlying representations (e.g., Gerbino, 2020; Haberman & Ulrich, 2019; Koenderink et al., 2018; Scherzer & Faul, 2019; Thielen et al., 2019). One issue stands out when considering the diversity of the present collection of papers.…”

“…One issue stands out when considering the diversity of the present collection of papers. Although the term amodal completion suggests that we are dealing with a single unified concept, the underlying processes are probably multiple (see also, Gerbino, 2020; Thielen et al., 2019). Amodal presence might very well be as rich as modal presence when it comes to determining underlying processing aspects.…”