Understanding visual perceptional organization remains a challenge for vision science. This manual explores ideas emanating from behavioural, developmental, neurophysiological, neuropsychological and computational approaches to the problem of visual perceptual organization. Based on papers presented at the 31st Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, held in June 2000, it addresses how the growing body of research on perceptual organization has converged on a number of critical issues including: the stimulus factors that engage the mechanisms of organization; the temporal stage of processing at which organization occurs; and the relations between perceptual organization and both object recognition and visual attention. Divided into four parts, the text also focuses on open questions revolving around the developmental stage at which mechanisms of organization are available and what the role of past experience and learning is in perceptual organization. Part I presents an overview of the problem of perceptual organization, different frameworks for understanding perceptual organization, and a state-of-the-art summary of the domain.
Part II details which organizational processes are hardwired in the perceptual system, which are acquired through experience, and how object perception relates to other aspects of cognition. Part III describes various attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual organization using two different approaches - neurophysiological and neuropsychological. Part IV offers a computational approach to the problem. The work is intended for cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, computational vision scientists and developmental psychologists.