ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews some of Naomi Weisstein's seminal work on high-level effects on the perception. It discusses research revealing effects of past experience and global context on figure assignment. The chapter presents Weisstein's own work on figure assignment and interpret it in a Bayesian framework in which learning produces priors for figure assignment. It summarizes that Weisstein's influence is enduring. The chapter also reviews work from laboratory revealing that: memories for previously seen object configurations are priors for figure assignment; and figure assignment is affected by scene-wide information. It examines evidence that memory for familiar configurations serves as an object detection prior as well. Weisstein and her colleagues conducted a series of experiments investigating the relationship between figure assignment and spatial frequency. These experiments can be understood as evidence that observers learn that different types of information are typically extracted from figures. Weisstein's research showing that high spatial frequency analysis is coupled with figural status.