CCN meeting | Eline Van Geert (KU Leuven, Belgium), invited by Wim Fias

In the eye of the beholder? How viewer and context shape our visual experiences

Our visual experiences are shaped not only by the sensory input we receive, but also by the way in which we psychologically organize this input in a specific context. Gestalt psychology suggests that psychological organization will always be as ‘good’ as possible given the prevailing circumstances. But what does it mean for a psychological organization to be ‘good’, and how do viewers clarify the incoming visual stimuli to achieve the best possible percept? 

To achieve the best or clearest overall organization possible, human perceivers use internal prototype representations as reference points. If no strong pre-existing reference points are available, the immediate context can play a more extensive role in disambiguating the visual input. Sometimes these reference points lead to increased sensitivity to change, but other times they act as robust magnets, increasing perceptual similarity between neighboring stimuli. 

This talk will present a series of behavioral experiments related to how input, person, and context interact to perceptually clarify the incoming visual information. In addition, I will showcase a recent approach to study subjective visual experiences in an experimentally controlled but more ecologically valid manner, taking into account the multidimensionality of our perceptual environments.