Previous research suggests that the right and left hemispheres dominate global and local perception of hierarchical patterns, respectively. The current work examined whether global perception of hierarchi-cal stimuli requires coherent work of bilateral visual cortices using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Subjects discriminated global or local properties of compound letters in Experiment 1. Reaction times were recorded when single-pulse real TMS or sham TMS was delivered over the left or right visual cortex. While a global precedence effect (i.e., faster responses to global than local targets and stronger global-to-local interference than the reverse) was observed, TMS decreased global-to-local interference whereas increased local-to-global interference. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that the effects observed in Experiment 1 resulted from perceptual learning. Experiment 3 used compound shapes and observed TMS effect similar to that in Experiment 1. Moreover, TMS also slowed global RTs whereas speeded up local RTs in Experiment 3. Finally, the TMS effects observed in Experiments 1 and 3 did not differ between the conditions when TMS was applied over the left and right hemispheres. The results support a coherence hypothesis that global perception of compound stimuli depends upon the co-herent work of bilateral visual cortices.
ZHANG Xin1 & HAN ShiHui1,2 1 Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
We investigated the effect of low spatial fre-quency (SF) filtering on neural substrates underlying global and local processing in the peripheral vision by measuring hemodynamic responses with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Subjects identified global or local shapes of compound letters that were either broadband in spatial- frequency spectrum or contrast balanced (CB) to removed low SFs and displayed randomly in the left or right visual fields. Attention to both broadband and CB global shapes generated stronger activation over the medial occipital cor-tex relative to local attention. Lateralized activations in association with global processing were observed over the right temporal-parietal junction for broadband stimuli whereas over the right fusiform gyrus for CB stimuli. Atten-tion to CB local shapes resulted in activations in the medial frontal cortex, bilateral inferior frontal and superior tempo-ral cortices. The results were discussed in terms of the competition between global and local information in determining brain activations in association with global/local processing of compound stimuli.
Palmer and Rock proposed that uniform connectedness (UC) occurs prior to classical Gestalt factors to define the primitive units for visual perception. Han, Humphreys and Chen, how-ever, found that grouping by proximity can take place as quickly as that based on UC in a letter discrimination task. The present study employed a letter detection task to examine the relationship between UC and proximity grouping in 3 experiments. We showed that reaction times to targets defined by proximity or UC were equally fast when one or two global objects were presented in the visual field. However, as the number of global objects was increased, responses were faster to targets defined by UC than to targets defined by proximity. In addition, the advantage of UC over proximity was not affected by the space between global objects. The results suggest that UC was more effective than proximity in forming perceptual units under multiple object conditions. Possible reasons for this finding are discussed.
