Kanizsa-type subjective contours do not guide attentional deployment in visual search but line termination contours do.

Running head: SUBJECTIVE CONTOURS GUIDING ATTENTION (P544) Kanisza-style Subjective Contours Do Not Guide Attentional Deployment in Visual Search but Line-termination Contours Do

The representation of Kanizsa illusory contours in the monkey inferior temporal cortex.

Stimulus reduction is an effective way to study visual performance. Cues such as surface characteristics, colour and inner lines can be removed from stimuli, revealing how the change affects recognition and neural processing. An extreme reduction is the removal of the very stimulus, defining it with illusory lines. Perceived boundaries without physical differences between shape and background a...

Illusory contours

Illusory contours are perceived in the absence of any real physical luminance gradients between inducers that are spatially discontinuous (Fig. 1a,b).1–3 It has been controversial whether the perception of these subjective contours arise from higher level cognitive mechanisms that depend on attention and serial search4–6 or from lower level parallel processing in the early automatic, preattenti...

Subjective contours and binocular rivalry suppression

Binocular rivalry probably involves distributed neural processes, some responsible for dominance, others for suppression and still others for fluctuations in perception. Focusing on the suppression process, the present study asks whether neural events underlying rivalry suppression take place prior to, or subsequent to those underlying the synthesis of subjective contours. Specifically, we exam...

Illusory Contours Do Not Pass through the "Blind Spot"

Our visual percepts are not fully determined by the physical stimulus input. That is why we perceive crisp bounding contours even in the absence of luminance-defined borders in visual illusions such as the Kanizsa figure. It is important to understand which neural processes are involved in creating these artificial visual experiences because this might tell us how we perceive coherent objects i...