New Gestalt principles of perceptual organization: an extension from grouping to shape and meaning

Abstract

This article summarized brain design principles and neural models which realize them to explain many visual percepts, notably those summarized in the 2009 Metzger prize-winning article of Baingio Pinna entitled “New Gestalt principles of perceptual organization: An extension from grouping to shape and meaning”. The neural principles and models have been discovered by Stephen Grossberg and his colleagues. They include explanations of how the brain accomplishes 3-D vision and figure-ground perception using hierarchically organized interactions between 3-D boundaries and surfaces; how both opaque and transparent surfaces are generated; how brain processes of consciousness, learning, expectation, attention, resonance, and synchrony are organized and related; and how the brain learns invariant object categories during eye movement search. These models illustrate how the brain is organized into parallel processing streams that compute complementary properties, and how these streams interact to overcome their complementary deficiencies to generate conscious visual percepts. The article explains the basis for the prediction that we consciously see surface-shroud resonances, how we can recognize amodal percepts without seeing them, and how we can consciously recognize familiar percepts whether or not we can see them. These explanations are contained in the FACADE, 3D LAMINART, ART, and ARTSCAN neural models. Keywords: Grouping, surface filling-in, figure-ground separation, attention, Adaptive Resonance Theory, FACADE, LAMINART, ARTSCAN