Study On The Visual Perception Of 'Hole' And 'No-hole' Figures

In the research of visual perception, there is a debate between global-first and local-first theories. The former is represented by Gestalt psychology, while the latter is represented by feature-integration theory. In 1982, Chen Lin proposed a theory named topological perception, which is substantial evidence to global-first theory. Original from Chen's work, we proposed the property of 'hole' is important and is one of the reasons to cause topological perception. We discussed the sensitivity of 'hole' in visual perception from three different studies:1. Compared to 'no-hole', 'hole' evokes lower perceptual load. This is supported by two evidences: the behavioral study showed that, alteration of distractor can disturb 'hole' significantly but cannot disturb 'no-hole', indicating 'no-hole' costs more perceptual capacity than 'hole', and prevents the entrance of distractor to perception. The ERP study showed that, 'no-hole' evokes enhanced N1 than 'hole', indicating more attention is demanded for 'no-hole'.2. In figure-ground-segregation task, 'hole' is easier to be segregated than 'no-hole'. Utilizing backward masking paradigm, it's found that under same masking effect, 'hole' is more visible than 'no-hole'. The REP results showed that, temporal visual cortex responded strongly to 'hole' than to 'no-hole', thus facilitate the feedback connection in ventral visual pathway. So the segregation of 'hole' from its background is easier than 'no-hole'.3. We reversed 'hole' and 'no-hole' figures with different directions, and EEG was recorded. The results showed that, the latency of N1 is more sensitive to the reverse effect of 'hole' compared to 'no-hole'. According to the research on face recognition, we concluded that the process of 'hole' is global-first, while the process of 'no-hole' is local-first. The above studies focus on the sensitivity of 'hole' at the early stage of visual perception. The results convergently showed that, 'hole' is easier to be perceived than 'no-hole'. The sensitivity of 'hole' is one of the reasons to cause topological perception. From a neuroscientific approach, we found new substantial evidence to global-first theory.