Parallelism is an emergent feature not derived from the detection of individual line slopes

Pomerantz, James R.; Chapman, Curtiss A.; Flynn, Jon; Noe, Colin; Yingxue, Tian

doi:10.1167/17.10.166

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…An emergent feature refers to the salient property of a spatial configuration resulting from the combination of basic features ( Pomerantz & Cragin, 2014 ). Previous studies have already shown that specific line configurations may elicit emergent features such as parallelism or collinearity ( Pomerantz, Chapman, Flynn, Noe, & Yingxue, 2017 ; Stupina, 2011 ). Crucially, the basic features themselves are perceived less promptly than the emergent configurations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such configural superiority generally facilitates the identification of its constituting parts, as a tilted line was better identified when part of an organized object than within a less coherent context ( Weisstein & Harris, 1974 ). Similarly, determining which of four lines had a different tilt compared to three other identical lines was facilitated when the addition of a non-informative line created four-line pairs, of which three were parallel and one non-parallel (or vice versa) ( Pomerantz, Chapman, Flynn, Noe, & Yingxue, 2017 ). These findings are well in line with the results of Experiment 2 , showing a configural superiority effect for three-line configurations with unidirectional flankers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Multidimensional feature interactions in visual crowding: When configural cues eliminate the polarity advantage

Rummens

Sayim

2022

Journal of Vision

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Crowding occurs when surrounding objects (flankers) impair target perception. A key property of crowding is the weaker interference when target and flankers strongly differ on a given dimension. For instance, identification of a target letter is usually superior with flankers of opposite versus the same contrast polarity as the target (the “polarity advantage”). High performance when target-flanker similarity is low has been attributed to the ungrouping of target and flankers. Here, we show that configural cues can override the usual advantage of low target-flanker similarity, and strong target-flanker grouping can reduce – instead of exacerbate – crowding. In Experiment 1 , observers were presented with line triplets in the periphery and reported the tilt (left or right) of the central line. Target and flankers had the same (uniform condition) or opposite contrast polarity (alternating condition). Flanker configurations were either upright (||), unidirectionally tilted (\\ or //), or bidirectionally tilted (\/ or /\). Upright flankers yielded stronger crowding than unidirectional flankers, and weaker crowding than bidirectional flankers. Importantly, our results revealed a clear interaction between contrast polarity and flanker configuration. Triplets with upright and bidirectional flankers, but not unidirectional flankers, showed the polarity advantage. In Experiments 2 and 3 , we showed that emergent features and redundancy masking (i.e. the reduction of the number of perceived items in repeating configurations) made it easier to discriminate between uniform triplets when flanker tilts were unidirectional (but not when bidirectional). We propose that the spatial configurations of uniform triplets with unidirectional flankers provided sufficient task-relevant information to enable a similar performance as with alternating triplets: strong-target flanker grouping alleviated crowding. We suggest that features which modulate crowding strength can interact non-additively, limiting the validity of typical crowding rules to contexts where only single, independent dimensions determine the effects of target-flanker similarity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%