ABSTRACT
Our perception of the world appears to be a spatiotemporally seamless feat. Gestalt psychologists took such spatiotemporal unity to be a basic phenomenal datum rather than an assemblage derived from more elementary processes. Even the spatiotemporal unity of perception of moving objects, extensively investigated by Gestalt psychologists like Wertheimer (1912) and Ternus (1926), is characterized by a smoothness and a continuity that are subject to the same overarching factors of sensory organization giving rise also, when viewing static objects, to good shape and good continuation (Koffka, 1935). As more fully discussed by Öğmen and Herzog (see Chapter 7 in this volume), the factors governing the perception of objects in motion apply to the preservation as well as transformation of their phenomenal identity in various dynamic settings. As interesting as these phenomena are, the present chapter takes a different, microgenetic approach to the dynamics of the object perception. It will demonstrate that underlying the apparently seamless feat of the unitary perception of visual objects is a series of specifiable temporally successive transformations, some of which, not accessible to phenomenal report at all, must be inferred from results of more recent theoretical, psychophysical and electrophysiological research.
