Illusion Contour And Symmetry

Illusory contour(IC)perception and symmetry perception are two important processes in human perception of the external world,and become the research hotspots in cognitive psychology.Previous studies had carried out a lot of researches on the influence of low-level stimuli on the two perception processes,while seldom considered the influence of middle and high-level stimuli on the perception process.In this paper,IC and symmetry were selected as additional middle and high-level stimulus characteristics in the dual vision perception to study the cognitive psychological mechanism of the two perception processes,especially focused on the mutual influence and perceptual sequence.This study designed a relatively novel experimental paradigm of dual-vision perception including IC and symmetry.We studied the cognitive psychological mechanism of IC and symmetry and obtained following conclusions:(1)The existence of IC helped the detection of symmetry,and the existence of symmetry also affected the early modulation of IC perception.(2)Both IC and symmetry activated the lateral occipital cortex(LOC).Our results showed that their process in LOC followed a certain processing sequence: LOC pre-processed the symmetry firstly,then integrated the IC,and finally carried out the post-evaluation of symmetry.(3)Different from previous researches,our study found that early visual brain regions,such as the primary visual cortex,also plaied a certain role in symmetry detection.(4)Our experimental results supported that the IC perception seems like a two-way path model between V1 and LOC,while symmetric perception is more in line with the holographic model.The results of this study provide new scientific evidence for contour perception and symmetry perception mechanisms.It also has great reference value for the treatment of patients with visual perception disorders such as amblyopia.