The human visual system is highly sensitive to biological motion and manages to organize even a highly reduced point-light stimulus into a vivid percept of human action. The current study investigated to what extent the origin of this saliency of point-light displays is related to its intrinsic Gestalt qualities. In particular, we studied whether biological motion perception is facilitated when...

We show that the performance of existing fault localization algorithms differs markedly for different networks; and no algorithm simultaneously provides high localization accuracy and low computational overhead. We develop a framework to explain these behaviors by anatomizing the algorithms with respect to six important characteristics of real networks, such as uncertain dependencies, noise, an...

Selective attention has been intensively studied using the Stroop task. Evidence suggests that Stroop interference in a color-naming task arises partly because of visual attention sharing between color and word: Removing the target color after 150 msec reduces interference (Neumann, 1986). Moreover, removing both the color and the word simultaneously reduces interference less than does removing...

The paper begins by focusing the basic idea that Gestalt phenomena belong not only to the realm of perception but to the realm of inference. It is shown that Gestalt effects (i.e. the derivability of incompatible indifferent conclusions on the basis of the same background information) often occur both in counterfactual and in ampliative – i.e. inductive and abductive – reasoning. The main thesi...

Games are a popular form of digital entertainment and one elusive question is how complex visual designs affect the player experience. We address one aspect of this topic in terms of similarity of visual features, explored both as an organizing principle in Gestalt psychology and as a theory in visual attention. To address this issue, we developed a 3D railed shooter game with adjustable visual...

In writing about the present status of Gestalt psychology in Italy, a reference to the picture of it recently published by Ian VERSTEGEN (2000) is a ‘must’. He concludes his paper with the statement: “Psychology in Italy by the 1990s had been completely internationalised and ‘Americanized’. There is no fourth generation of Italian Gestalt psychology of which we may speak”. It is my impression t...

Baingio Pinna’s article “New Gestalt principles of perceptual organization: An extension from grouping to shape and meaning” won the 2009 Metzger Award of the Society for Gestalt !eory and its Applications. In this article, Pinna presented a variety of novel images that probe the way in which local and global factors interact to generate the percepts that we consciously see. As Pinna noted at t...

This letter presents a mathematical model of figure-ground articulation that takes into account both local and global gestalt laws and is compatible with the functional architecture of the primary visual cortex (V1). The local gestalt law of good continuation is described by means of suitable connectivity kernels that are derived from Lie group theory and quantitatively compared with long-range...

This paper discusses the notion that presence may be considered as a selection mechanism that organizes the stream of sensory data into an environmental gestalt or perceptual hypothesis about current environment. A particular environmental gestalt results in scan-sensing of the world in a particular pattern reminiscent of saccades and fixations in eye scan paths. The environment hypothesis is c...