The Role of Feedback in the Determination of Figure and Ground: A Combined Behavioral & Modeling Study

Object knowledge can exert on important influence on even the earliest stages of visual processing. This study demonstrates how a familiarity bias, acquired only briefly before testing, can affect the subsequent segmentation of an otherwise ambiguous figure-ground array, in favor of perceiving the familiar shape as figure. The behavioral data are then replicated using a biologically plausible neural network model that employs feedback connections to implement the demonstrated familiarity bias.