Elsevier

Cognitive Psychology

Volume 35, Issue 1, February 1998, Pages 71-98
Cognitive Psychology

Regular Article
On the Lawfulness of Grouping by Proximity,☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1997.0673Get rights and content

Abstract

The visual system groups close things together. Previous studies of grouping by proximity have failed to measure grouping strength or to assess the effect of configuration. We do both. We reanalyze data from an experiment by Kubovy and Wagemans (1995) in which they briefly presented multi-stable dot patterns that can be perceptually organized into alternative collections of parallel strips of dots, and in which they parametrically varied the distances between dots and the angles between alternative organizations. Our analysis shows that relative strength of grouping into strips of dots of a particular orientation approximates a decreasing exponential function of the relative distance between dots in that orientation. The configural or wholistic properties that were varied—such as angular separations of the alternative organizations and the symmetry properties of the dot pattern—do not matter. Additionally, this grouping function is robust under transformations of scale in space (Experiment 1) and time (Experiment 2). Grouping of units which are themselves the result of grouping (i.e., pairs of dots; Experiment 3) also follows our nonconfigural rule.

References (20)

  • J. Wagemans et al.

    Higher-order structure in regularity detection

    Vision Research

    (1993)
  • A. Bravais

    On the systems formed by points regularly distributed on a plane or in space

    (1949)
  • J.J. Girgus et al.

    The effect of knowledge of reversibility on the reversibility of ambiguous figures

    Perception & Psychophysics

    (1974)
  • J. Hochberg

    Organization and the gestalt tradition

    Handbook of perception

    (1974)
  • J. Hochberg et al.

    Brightness and proximity factors in grouping

    Perceptual and Motor Skills

    (1960)
  • J. Hochberg et al.

    A quantitative index of stimulus-similarity: Proximity versus differences in brightness

    American Journal of Psychology

    (1956)
  • D.H. Krantz et al.

    Foundations of measurement

    (1971)
  • M. Kubovy

    Concurrent pitch segregation and the theory of indispensable attributes

  • M. Kubovy

    The perceptual organization of dot lattices

    Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

    (1994)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (139)

  • Serial processing of proximity groups and similarity groups

    2024, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
View all citing articles on Scopus

This research was supported by PHS Grant 5 R01 MH473717 to the University of Virginia (M. Kubovy, PI). M. Kubovy was Research Associate at the University of Leuven in Summer, 1995. J. Wagemans was Research Associate at the University of Virginia in 1993–4 and in the Summer of 1995. He was supported by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, a NATO Fellowship, a Fulbright Hayes Award, and a grant to the Cognitive Psychology group at the University of Virginia from the University's Academic Enhancement Program. During the revision of the paper, J.W. was supported by a grant from the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FWO-Vlaanderen, G.0210.97N). Some of this research was reported by A. O. Holcombe in his undergraduate Distinguished Major thesis, submitted to the Psychology Department at the University of Virginia in May, 1995. Some of this research was also reported at the 1995 annual meeting of ARVO, and at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. A. O. Holcombe is now at the Department of Psychology, Harvard University. We thank J. C. Baird, S. Boker, J. A. Hollier, and A. Jalis for their helpful suggestions; A. Jalis for his excellent programming, and J. A. Hollier, N. Greenberg, J. Seiters, and T. Yang for their unstinting help as observers. Finally, we thank J. Seiters and M. Snyder for their assistance in running experiments.

Address request reprints to M. Kubovy, Department of Psychology, Gilmer Hall, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2477. E-mail:[email protected]. Holcombe's e-mail address [email protected]. Wagemans' e-mail address [email protected].

☆☆

E. C. CarteretteM. P. Friedman

View full text