Perceiving and recovering structure from events (abstract only)

Abstract

How do perceivers identify a moving object as seen against a changing background? How do figure and ground separate? Such questions have engaged psychologists for at least seventy years. In particular, the Gestalt psychologists were deeply concerned with the latter, but had only the illdefined notion of common fate , or uniform density, for dealing with the former. The coherent flow of a moving object is seen, somehow, by extracting those aspects of the whole that segregate it from the ground; the uniform destiny of all parts of the object was thought both to make the whole cohere and to separate the whole from all else. Two pairs of ideas, from two researchers who came out of the Gestalt tradition, helped elucidate the notion of common fate as applied to motion perception.