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Observational drawing skill has been shown to be associated with the ability to focus on local visual details. It is unclear whether superior performance in local processing is indicative of the ability to attend to, and flexibly switch between, local and global levels of visual stimuli. It is also unknown whether these attentional enhancements remain specific to observational drawing skill or are a product of a wide range of artistic activities. The current study aimed to address these questions by testing if flexible visual processing predicts artistic group membership and observational drawing skill in a sample of first-year bachelor's degree art students (n=23) and non-art students (n=23). A pattern of local and global visual processing enhancements was found in relation to artistic group membership and drawing skill, with local processing ability found to be specifically related to individual differences in drawing skill. Enhanced global processing and more fluent switching between local and global levels of hierarchical stimuli predicted both drawing skill and artistic group membership, suggesting that these are beneficial attentional mechanisms for art-making in a range of domains. These findings support a top-down attentional model of artistic expertise and shed light on the domain specific and domain-general attentional enhancements induced by proficiency in the visual arts., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Human sensitivity for social cues is exquisite, as illustrated by the ease with which simplified point-light movements invoke social and emotional responses. Compared to faces, these biological motion stimuli only recently started to be used to explore questions regarding social cognition and anxiety. We presented human point-light walkers that could be perceived as facing towards or facing away from the observer, and tested whether participants with high social anxiety would perceive these bistable stimuli differently, because this type of stimuli has particular relevance for them. The results showed that observers with high social anxiety tended to see walkers as facing away more frequently than those with low social anxiety. This may mean that high socially anxious observers are biased towards the more positive perceptual alternative because they are motivated to protect themselves against threatening social experiences, but we also explore alternative explanations. The findings are in line with the evidence for a positivity bias in perception, also called wishful seeing, but in contrast with the attentional negativity bias often found in social anxiety. We discuss reasons for this divergence and possible limitations of the current study., (© 2013.)

A central problem in the literature on psychological aesthetics is a lack of precision in terminology regarding the description and measurement of aesthetic impressions. The current research project approached the problem of terminology empirically, by studying people's word usage to describe aesthetic impressions. For eight different object classes that are relevant in visual aesthetics, including visual art, landscapes, faces and different design classes, we examined which words people use to describe their aesthetic impressions, and which general conceptual dimensions might underlie similarities and differences between the classes. The results show an interplay between generality and specificity in aesthetic word usage. In line with results by Jacobsen, Buchta, Kohler, and Schroger (2004)beautiful and ugly seem to be the words with most general relevance, but in addition each object class has its own distinct pattern of relevant terms. Multidimensional scaling and correspondence analysis suggest that the most extreme positions in aesthetic word usage for the classes studied are taken by landscapes and geometric shapes and patterns. This research aims to develop a language of aesthetics for the visual modality. Such a common vocabulary should facilitate the development of cross-disciplinary models of aesthetics and create a basis for the construction of standardised aesthetic measures., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In the current study, we investigated at which moment during visual object categorization alternative interpretations are most strongly activated. According to an early activation account, we are uncertain about how to interpret the visual information early in the categorization process. This uncertainty will vanish over time and therefore, the number of possible response candidates decreases over time. According to a late activation account, the visual information is categorized quickly, but after extensive viewing alternative interpretations become more strongly activated. Therefore, the number of possible response candidates increases over time. To increase perceptual uncertainty we used morphed figures composed of a dominant and nondominant object. The similarity rating between morphed figures and their nondominant object was taken as indicator for the activation of the nondominant response candidate: high similarity indicates that the nondominant object is relatively strongly activated as an alternative response candidate. Presentation times were varied in order to distinguish between the early and late activation account. Using a Bayesian model selection approach, we found support for the late activation account, but not for the early activation account. It thus seems that in a late stage of the categorization process the influence of the nondominant response candidate is strongest., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Several decades after Michotte's work was published, it continues to inspire current research in perception, cognition, and beyond. In this special issue we pay tribute to this heritage with a collection of empirical and theoretical papers on amodal completion and the perception of causality, two areas of research within which Michotte's work and ideas have had a lasting influence. As a background to better understand the remaining papers, we briefly sketch Michotte's life and work and the scope (in breadth and in depth) of his impact. We then review Michotte's seminal contributions to the areas covered in this special issue, some of the major research discoveries and themes in the intervening decades, and the major open questions and challenges we are still facing. We also include a sneak preview of the papers in this special issue, noting how they relate to Michotte's work and to each other. This review shows both how much influence Michotte has had on contemporary perception and cognition research, and how much important work remains to be done. We hope that the papers in this special issue will serve both to celebrate Michotte's heritage in this respect, and to inspire other investigators to continue the projects he began.

Neuroimaging studies using positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) give an indication towards the localization of mental representations and processes in the human brain. It is not clear to what extent such global measures of neuronal activity, pooling across large populations of neurons, can reveal how certain computations are implemented by the neurons in such population ('computational neuroimaging'). Population activity is related tightly to single-cell activity when all neurons in the population have similar response properties. We describe some evidence from single-cell recordings in monkeys that indicates that neurons with similar response properties are not scattered randomly throughout the visual cortex. Notwithstanding this clustering, populations of nearby neurons are still rather heterogeneous, requiring some prudence in deriving single-cell response properties from population activity. The following review of recent neuroimaging studies of the visual system describes to what degree inferences about computations and representations can be drawn from these studies.

Two powerful grouping principles in visual perception have been studied rather frequently, namely, regularity and proximity. In many cases, however, the impact of either regularity or proximity was examined. The goal of the present research is to provide and test an experimental paradigm on the basis of which the relative strengths of these grouping factors can be studied. The proposed paradigm is based on early Gestalt observations that colors of local elements within a perceptual whole tend to look more like each other than they actually are. Three experiments were set up to test whether this phenomenon of color assimilation can provide a means to compare perceptual groupings induced by regularity and proximity. In all experiments, the stimuli were linear configurations of colored elements with variable distances between the elements. The task of the participants was to compare the color of a single test element with the colors of two different groups of elements. In Experiment 1, for all colors, the color of the test element was judged to be more similar to the color of the elements with which it can be grouped by means of regularity. In Experiment 2, for specific colors, the color of the test element tended to be more similar to the elements with which it can be grouped by means of proximity. Finally, in Experiment 3, configurations with a greater variety of positions were tested, including those yielding conflicting groupings, that is, on the basis of regularity and proximity different groupings were to be expected. The color judgements for these stimuli clearly reflected the competition between the two factors.

Wavelength information serves both to organise shapes and to provide the appearance of surfaces. These two roles are considered within a model that outlines the role of colour in picture naming (Davidoff and de Bleser, 1993). An introduction to the papers in this issue is given within the framework of the model. The topics in this issue cover the role of colour in scene segmentation, colour constancy and the memory for the colours of objects.

The experimental study of Gerbino and Salmaso (1987) focused on the process of amodal completion, i.e. the process that leads to the impression of a total pattern in the absence of information about all parts of the pattern. One of the questions that they have attempted to answer with respect to this process is whether or not it depends on the categorization of the modal part (i.e. the part about which visual information is present) as a modification of a complete prototype. The major conclusion of their experiments is that amodal completion does not depend upon categorization. Furthermore, they interpret their results as indicating that neither the truncated form of the occluded part nor the unification/segregation of contour segments are phenomenally real. We designed some variants of the tunnel effect to demonstrate (1) that the explicit categorization of some parts of the input can have an influence on amodal completion and (2) that the truncated form of a pattern can be phenomenally real. Our results corroborate these hypotheses and can, therefore, interpreted as refuting two rather central claims of Gerbino and Salmaso (1987). The conclusion of our experiment must be that amodal completion is not as primary as they have supposed but can be influenced by kinetic occlusion and categorization stored in visual memory.