Object grouping based on real-world regularities facilitates perception by reducing competitive interactions in visual cortex

Kaiser, Daniel; Stein, Timo; Peelen, Marius V. · 2014 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1400559111

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Summary

This study investigates how the human visual system manages attentional competition in cluttered environments by leveraging real-world spatial regularities. While previous research established that perceptual grouping based on low-level cues (e.g., Gestalt principles) reduces neural competition, less was known about whether higher-level conceptual knowledge of object relationships yields similar benefits. The authors hypothesized that objects frequently experienced in specific spatial configurations are perceptually grouped, thereby reducing the number of competing items and facilitating efficient perception. To test this, the researchers employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral visual search tasks. In the fMRI experiment, 25 participants viewed displays containing house stimuli (preferred for the parahippocampal place area, PPA) surrounded by pairs of everyday objects (nonpreferred distracters). These object pairs were presented either in their typical, regular configuration (e.g., a lamp above a table) or in an irregular, vertically reversed configuration. The design included simultaneous presentation to induce competition and sequential presentation as a control to isolate competitive interactions from differential responses to the stimuli themselves. Behavioral experiments involved 49 participants across three studies, where subjects localized target objects amidst distracter pairs arranged in regular, irregular, inverted, or shuffled configurations to rule out low-level visual explanations. The fMRI results demonstrated that neural activity in the PPA was stronger when houses were presented alongside regularly positioned object pairs compared to irregular ones, indicating reduced competitive suppression from the distracters. This effect was specific to the PPA and did not occur in the object-selective lateral occipital cortex or during sequential presentations where competition was absent. Behaviorally, participants exhibited higher accuracy in detecting target objects when distracters were arranged in regular configurations compared to irregular ones. Crucially, control experiments showed that this benefit disappeared when distracter pairs were inverted or shuffled, confirming that the effect relied on higher-level spatial-relational knowledge rather than low-level visual features or specific object positions. The findings conclude that the visual system exploits learned real-world regularities to group co-occurring objects, effectively reducing the number of items competing for neural representation. This mechanism facilitates attentional selection and improves perception in cluttered scenes. The study extends the understanding of biased competition theory by demonstrating that grouping benefits are not limited to low-level perceptual cues but also arise from conceptual knowledge of spatial relationships. This suggests that the brain utilizes long-term visual experience to optimize processing efficiency, allowing for rapid target detection in complex, natural environments by treating regularly associated objects as single perceptual units.

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• perceptual processing