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Project

Structuring perceptual organization: An individual differences perspective.

People can perceive the same world in radically different ways. #TheDress, the photograph of a dress of which the color was perceived either as black and blue or as white and gold, went viral and provided a stir precisely because it illustrates how individuals differ in their perception of what we generally consider to be objective aspects of the world. It is much less well appreciated that individuals also differ considerably in how they perceptually organize the world. Due to the fact that quantitative theories and measurements of perceptual organization have only recently been developed, it is only now possible to study individual differences in perceptual organization in a principled and quantitative manner. In this project, we will systematically test models of perceptual grouping principles (proximity, similarity, alignment), quantify how features emerge from the visual input, and elucidate how observers average visual input. The principled and quantitative nature of this approach will provide a unique contribution to the field. The results will reveal the structure of individual differences in perceptual organization, highlighting that individual differences need to be taken seriously to understand visual perception. Indeed, as individual differences can be used to confirm existing models of visual processing and to discover previously unknown processes, they provide a unique window of opportunities to advance our understanding of visual processing.

Date:1 Oct 2017 →  30 Sep 2020
Keywords:Perception
Disciplines:Biological and physiological psychology, General psychology, Other psychology and cognitive sciences