title: Lower region: a new cue for figure-ground assignment.
abstract: Figure-ground assignment is an important visual process; humans recognize, attend to, and act on figures, not backgrounds. There are many visual cues for figure-ground assignment. A new cue to figure-ground assignment, called lower region, is presented: Regions in the lower portion of a stimulus array appear more figurelike than regions in the upper portion of the display. This phenomenon was explored, and it was demonstrated that the lower-region preference is not influenced by contrast, eye movements, or voluntary spatial attention. It was found that the lower region is defined relative to the stimulus display, linking the lower-region preference to pictorial depth perception cues. The results are discussed in terms of the environmental regularities that this new figure-ground cue may reflect.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City 52242-1407, USA. shaun-vecera@uiowa.edu
authors.forename: Shaun P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Vecera
authors.forename: Edward K
authors.initials: EK
authors.lastname: Vogel
authors.forename: Geoffrey F
authors.initials: GF
authors.lastname: Woodman
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D003463:Cues; D005133:Eye Movements; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011897:Random Allocation; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception