Blending into the Crowd: Electrophysiological Evidence of Gestalt Perception of a Human Dyad: Extended discussion and theoretical viewpoint
Abstract
In this commentary, we provide further discussion and interpretation of a recent article entitled “Blending into the Crowd: Electrophysiological Evidence of Gestalt Perception of a Human Dyad”, published one year ago by the first author of the present commentary. Firstly, drawing a parallel between the experiment described in the above article and another closely comparable experimental study, we propose that the neural integration process evidenced when seeing two human shapes close in space is a marker of the categorization of a stimulus as a group of humans (two here) represented as an entity per se. We also highlight that the original article provides a new kind of primacy of global visual processing over local elements. Lastly, we suggest that holistic perceptual processing of a dyad and more generally of a group, might guide individual’s actions in response to intentions and behaviors at the group level.
The Frequency Tagging paradigm, where different visual stimuli are presented at different frequencies, has primarily been used to investigate low-level visual processing. More recently, studies focused on higherlevel processes, notably, hierarchical visual perceptual organization of complex objects and scenes. In these paradigms, the response at a stimulation frequency constitutes a marker of the stimulus-specific neural response while objective evidence of a perceptual integration of stimuli in a holistic representation, is provided by the response at some intermodulation (IM) components, when such components exist.
Domains
Psychology
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