Important Clues that Facilitate Visual Emergence: Three Psychological Experiments

TL;DR

This paper investigates the psychological factors influencing visual emergence perception, highlighting the importance of speckle density and key speckle arrangement through three experiments.

Contribution

It introduces an algorithm to quantify factors affecting emerging image perception and validates their influence via psychological experiments.

Findings

Speckle density impacts perception of emerging images.

Arrangement of key speckles facilitates visual emergence.

Automated generation of test images confirms the factors' significance.

Abstract

Visual emergence is the phenomenon in which the visual system obtains a holistic perception after grouping and reorganizing local signals. The picture Dalmatian dog is known for its use in explaining visual emergence. This type of image, which consists of a set of discrete black speckles (speckles), is called an emerging image. Not everyone can find the dog in Dalmatian dog, and among those who can, the time spent varies greatly. Although Gestalt theory summarizes perceptual organization into several principles, it remains ambiguous how these principles affect the perception of emerging images. This study, therefore, designed three psychological experiments to explore the factors that influence the perception of emerging images. In the first, we found that the density of speckles in the local area and the arrangements of some key speckles played a key role in the perception of an emerging case. We set parameters in the algorithm to characterize these two factors. We then automatically generated diversified emerging-test images (ETIs) through the algorithm and verified their effectiveness in two subsequent experiments.