PERCEIVED CONTINUITY OF OCCLUDED VISUAL OBJECTS

The human visual system does not rigidly preserve the properties of th e retinal image as neural signals are transmitted to higher areas of t he brain. Instead, it generates a representation that captures stable surface properties despite a retinal image that is often fragmented in space and time because of occlusion caused by object and observer mot ion. The recovery of this coherent representation depends at least in part on input from an abstract representation of three-dimensional (3- D) surface layout. In the two experiments reported, a stereoscopic app arent motion display was used to investigate the perceived continuity of a briefly interrupted visual object. When a surface appeared in fro nt of the object's location during the interruption, the object was mo re likely to be perceived as persisting through the interruption (behi nd an occluder) than when the surface appeared behind the object's loc ation under otherwise identical stimulus conditions. The results revea l the influence of 3-D surface-based representations even in very simp le visual tasks.