Figure 1.

Perceptual organization in natural vision and research. In natural scenes, perceptual grouping and segregation can (a) go hand in hand and facilitate object detection or (b) make segregation of the frog from the forest floor difficult. Despite these interactions in natural vision, research traditions in perceptual organization make use of very different stimuli: e.g. (c) a dot lattice for studying perceptual grouping (adjusted from Kubovy, Holcombe, & Wagemans, 1998), and (d) a texture pattern (reproduced with permission from Lamme, Rodriguez-Rodriguez, & Spekreijse,1999). In a more integrated approach, we can, for example, study (e) snake detection in which grouping based on collinearity facilitates segregation of a curve from the background noise, (f) texture segregation based on orientation similarity, (g) contour and texture surface interactions in radial frequency patterns, and (h) in everyday objects.