The perception of hierarchical structure

Visual objects are viewed as a prime example of hierarchical structure; they can be dened as “multilevel hierarchical structure of parts and wholes” (Palmer 1977). For instance, a human body is composed of parts—head, legs, arms, etc., which in turn are composed of parts—eyes, nose, and so forth. €e perceptual relations between wholes and their component parts have been a controversial issue for psychologists and philosophers before them. In psychology it can be traced back to the controversy between Structuralism and Gestalt. €e Structuralists, rooted rmly in British Empiricism, claimed that perceptions are constructed from atoms of elementary, unrelated local sensations that are unied by associations due to spatial and temporal contiguity. €e Gestalt theorists rejected both atomism and associationism. According to the doctrine of holism in traditional Gestalt psychology, a specic sensory whole is qualitatively dierent from the complex that one might predict by considering only its individual parts, and the quality of a part depends upon the whole in which this part is embedded (Köhler 1930/1971; Wertheimer 1923/1938; see also Wagemans, this volume). €is chapter focuses on some modern attempts to grapple with the issue of part-whole relationships: global precedence and the primacy of holistic properties. I begin with the presentation of the global precedence hypothesis and the global-local paradigm, followed by a brief review of the empirical ndings concerning the boundary conditions of the global advantage eect, it source and its brain localization. €e following sections focus on the microgenesis and the ontogenesis of the perception of hierarchical structure. I then discuss some issues concerning the interpretation of the global advantage eect, present a renement of terminology between global properties and holistic/congural properties, and review empirical evidence for this distinction and for the primacy of holistic properties. I close by brie„y considering the implications of the empirical evidence for the understanding of the perception of hierarchical structure and part-whole relationship.