a world of speculation

Kubovy M, 2007, "What might have been is an abstraction, a perpetual possibility, in a world of speculation: We are not aware of what we did not see in an ambiguous figure" Perception 36 ECVP Abstract Supplement

What might have been is an abstraction, a perpetual possibility, in a world of speculation: We are not aware of what we did not see in an ambiguous figure
M Kubovy


Considerable evidence supports the idea that perceptual organization happens late. This paper undermines this view and provides evidence that perceptual organization happens at an early stage of information processing. There has been reports on six experiments in which a second-choice paradigm borrowed from early studies of signal detection was used (and provided strong evidence against high-threshold theories of detection) and apply it to the forced-choice phenomenological psychophysics of perceptual organization. 

These experiments show that when observers report one organization of an ambiguous pattern (a 300 ms masked dot lattice), they have no information about what they did not see, even when they know that they will be asked to provide information about organizations that are not the most probable. The experiments also reveal that in the face of this dearth of information about what they did not see, observers use a strategy to confabulate: they choose the answer most different from the one that corresponds to what they saw.


[Supported by USPH grant from the National Eye Institute and the National Institute of Deafness and Communicative Disorders.]

pdf link