A "global closure" effect in contour integration

Abstract

Evaluation of global closure of contour is important in object perception in natural scenes including many occlusions. Here, we conducted psychophysical experiments to test the closure effect in contour integration within a single spatial frequency range using Gabor patches. We found that closed arrangements of the patches embedded in noise patches were more salient than open arrangements. This effect was seen even in the experiment using stimuli that isolated global closure effect excluding effect of local orientational continuity among adjacent patches. These findings suggest that processing for global closure of contour exists separately from that for local orientational continuity in the visual system. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.