期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2020
卷号：117
期号：21
页码：11735-11743
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1917565117
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Three-dimensional (3D) shape perception is one of the most important functions of vision. It is crucial for many tasks, from object recognition to tool use, and yet how the brain represents shape remains poorly understood. Most theories focus on purely geometrical computations (e.g., estimating depths, curvatures, symmetries). Here, however, we find that shape perception also involves sophisticated inferences that parse shapes into features with distinct causal origins. Inspired by marble sculptures such as Strazza’s The Veiled Virgin (1850), which vividly depict figures swathed in cloth, we created composite shapes by wrapping unfamiliar forms in textile, so that the observable surface relief was the result of complex interactions between the underlying object and overlying fabric. Making sense of such structures requires segmenting the shape based on their causes, to distinguish whether lumps and ridges are due to the shrouded object or to the ripples and folds of the overlying cloth. Three-dimensional scans of the objects with and without the textile provided ground-truth measures of the true physical surface reliefs, against which observers’ judgments could be compared. In a virtual painting task, participants indicated which surface ridges appeared to be caused by the hidden object and which were due to the drapery. In another experiment, participants indicated the perceived depth profile of both surface layers. Their responses reveal that they can robustly distinguish features belonging to the textile from those due to the underlying object. Together, these findings reveal the operation of visual shape-segmentation processes that parse shapes based on their causal origin.
关键词：perception ; vision ; art ; transparency ; perceptual organization
