ABSTRACT
Perception of objects from information that is fragmentary in and time ldls much about the acler of perception generally. It illustrates, as the gestalt psychologists emphasized, that the outputs of ceptual processes do not mirror local sensory inputs. Perception of unitary objects and continuom boundaries despite occlusion depends on spatial and temporal relationships in the input, and leads to abstract representations (completed objects and boundaries) in the output. Until recently, however, ideas about the process have been vague. Claims that perception involves simplicity, inference, hypothesis test· ing, or prior knowledge, or a combination oi these. have placed few bounds on the processes and knowledge potentially involved.
