What do we see behind an occluder? Amodal completion of statistical properties in complex objects

Cherian, T and Arun, SP (2024) What do we see behind an occluder? Amodal completion of statistical properties in complex objects. In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics .

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Abstract

When a spiky object is occluded, we expect its spiky features to continue behind the occluder. Although many real-world objects contain complex features, it is unclear how more complex features are amodally completed and whether this process is automatic. To investigate this issue, we created pairs of displays with identical contour edges up to the point of occlusion, but with occluded portions exchanged. We then asked participants to search for oddball targets among distractors and asked whether relations between searches involving occluded displays would match better with relations between searches involving completions that are either globally consistent or inconsistent with the visible portions of these displays. Across two experiments involving simple and complex shapes, search times involving occluded displays matched better with those involving globally consistent compared with inconsistent displays. Analogous analyses on deep networks pretrained for object categorization revealed a similar pattern of results for simple but not complex shapes. Thus, deep networks seem to extrapolate simple occluded contours but not more complex contours. Taken together, our results show that amodal completion in humans is sophisticated and can be based on extrapolating global statistical properties. © The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2024.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
Publisher:	Springer
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to the publishers.
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Neuroscience
Date Deposited:	14 Nov 2024 21:20
Last Modified:	14 Nov 2024 21:20
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/86858

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