All of which reminds us that a key goal of vision is to detect objects (not merely contours), using any information that happens to be available. Both modal and amodal completion, and the illusions they inspire, derive from this elementary visual imperative

This article was originally published with the title Reading between the Lines.

3 Comments

1. 1. jtdwyer 06:50 PM 8/30/10

   As I understand, the brain includes a specialized pattern recognition system that can recognize faces, familiar shapes, etc., much faster than we can process language, for example. It seem quite feasible that this 'dedicated hardware' is simply invoked many times in a brute force attempt to identify a discrete number of critical but incomplete shapes within visual data.
   
   General purpose computers serially process data, whereas parallel architectures can (once required data is in place) can perform a given function on an array of like data (such as an image) in the time required to process a single element (pixel). A specialized parallel image comparator could very quickly provide assessments of partial images, whereas a similar process implemented using serial functions would require an enormous amount of processing logic, move a lot of data and take a very long time to complete.
   
   This image recognition function is very important and useful to living organisms...

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2. 2. nthmost 08:48 AM 9/5/10

   I think it's likely we'll see the same generalized amodal completion algorithm at work in all forms of sensory processing and cognition: language, proprioception, etc.

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3. 3. nancedk 10:55 AM 9/17/10

   i am looking for special edition 169 best illusions i have called r customer service number it is disconnected please tell me where i can buy this issue or can i order it? dnance56@att.net

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