Visual Groupings on the Basis of Similarity and Proximity : A Model and Experimental Results

How objects are grouped in the visual field is a fundamental question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer. Traditional Gestalt principles suggest a number of rules that determine groupings such as proximity, similarity, closure, and common fate. But these rules are misleading, because they implicitly assume arbitrarily large groups can be formed in a single glance, and that different groups can be maintained in parallel. In fact, only one group can typically be focused on at any given time, and within this group, only a subset of the objects present will be full members of the attentional field. A neurophysiologically-realistic model of this effect is presented, and shown to be consistent with the experimental evidence