Visual Feature Integration in a World of Objects

Throughout the history of psychology, the study of perception has been marked by a conflict between analytic and holistic views. According to the analytic view, object recognition involves analysis of the visual input of stimulus features. A stimulus is recognized to the extent that it contains the appropriate features and these features are registered by the visual system. Early examples of the analytic approach include the British empiricists and the structuralists. The holistic view, described by the Gestalt school, claims that recognition involves more than analysis of a stimulus into parts. According to this view, a collection of features is not sufficient for object recognition. These apparently conflicting views lead to the following question: Do we recognize a cherry because we register the features round and red, or is a cherry more than an assortment of features? In studying the perceptual phenomenon of illusory conjunctions, my colleagues and I have found that