ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two visual phenomena: the object-superiority effect and phantom gratings. These two phenomena are very germane and ongoing research in visual cognition and neuroscience. Visual perception can be categorized, primitive 1-D features such as the orientations of lines, which when conjoined can give rise to the percepts of 2-D structures and, can yield percepts of higher-order structures of 3-D objects. The upshot, as in the word-superiority effect, is that the visibility of targets embedded, in 3-D object-like stimuli are also immunized against an otherwise powerful masking effect. This indicates that holistically perceived visual objects can effectively increase the visibility of their parts. Top-down re-entrant activation thus plays a major role in several theoretical approaches to visual object perception. This indicates that visual object perception, and visual perception in general, depend on the dynamic neural interactions between bottom-up feedforward and top-down feedback cortical processing.
