Michael Kubovy

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Virginia

This article consists of two parts. The first is a reconstruction of the opposition between explanatory principles in perception: simplicity and likelihood. The second offers a resolution of this long-standing debate.1. The debate. After Mach presented his balanced and prescient views about likelihood and simplicity, a schism occurred between two c...

In this article I generalize the notion of multiple self-aspects to create a descriptive framework in which lives are partitioned into containers of activities called strands. Strands are nearly decomposable life modules, structured, stable, and concurrent longitudinal streams of extended duration whose momentary cross-sections constitute self-aspe...

Some neuroaestheticians have adopted a strongly reductionistic view of the arts and sought to supplant scholarship about the arts with an understanding of their evolutionary and neuropsychological underpinnings. I use the work of several neuroaestheticians to provide examples of four problematic tendencies that beset this approach: (1) assume that...

[In press, Art & Perception] Some neuroaestheticians have adopted a strongly reductionistic view of the arts and sought to supplant scholarship about the arts with an understanding of their evolutionary and neuropsy- chological underpinnings. I use the work of several neuroaestheticians to provide examples of four problematic tendencies that beset...

In this article (in press, Perspectives in Psychological Science) I generalize the notion of multiple self-aspects to create a descriptive framework in which lives are partitioned into containers of activities called strands. Strands are nearly-decomposable life-modules, structured, stable, and concurrent longitudinal streams of extended duration w...

An audiovisual correspondence (AVC) refers to an observer's seemingly arbitrary yet consistent matching of sensory features across the two modalities; for example, between an auditory pitch and visual size. Research on AVCs has frequently used a speeded classification procedure in which participants are asked to rapidly classify an image when it is...

We investigated the effect of tempo on the production of the syncopated 3-2 son clave rhythm. We recorded eleven experienced percussionists performing the clave pattern at tempi ranging from 70 bpm to 210 bpm. As tempo increased, percussionists shortened the longest intervals and lengthened the shortest interval towards an intermediate interval tha...

Diaries are used to record aspects of lives --- activities, events, experiences, feelings, thoughts, and physiological measures. Smart diaries can reduce the user's burden by automatically registering some of these aspects. Existing systems have two weaknesses: (a) they are not extensible, and (b) their design is not theory-driven. We introduce Lif...

Previous research has found that there is an inherent association between auditory and visual dimensions such as the height a pitch and the size of an object. From this, researchers have assumed that such audiovisual correspondences must result solely from bottom-up processing. In a series of studies, we sought to separate bottom-up and top-down ef...

This paper revisits the conclusion of our previous work regarding the dominance of meaning in the competition between rhythmic parsing and linguistic parsing. We played five-note rhythm patterns in which each sound is a spoken word of a five-word sentence. We asked listeners to indicate the starting point of the rhythm while disregarding which word...

Psychology has always treated behavior and experience as embedded in a unidimensional flow in time, the "stream of behavior". This means that events and actions occupy non-overlapping time-intervals in this stream. Nevertheless a phenomenological analysis reveals that the structure of lives is richer and far more interesting. Using Herbert Simon's...

In this paper, we explore the rules followed by the auditory system in grouping temporal patterns. Imagine the following cyclical pattern (which we call an "auditory necklace"-AN for short-because those patterns are best visualized as beads arranged on a circle) consisting of notes (1s) and rests (0s): … 1110011011100110 …. It is perceived either a...

We provide a test of Patel's [(200323. Patel, A. D. (2003). Language, music, syntax and the brain. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 674–681. doi: 10.1038/nn1082View all references). Language, music, syntax and the brain. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 674–681] shared syntactic integration resources hypothesis by investigating the competition between determinants o...

Background / Purpose: This study examined grouping by proximity and binocular disparity. Participants were asked to report their perception of ambiguous stimuli where the strength of both proximity and stereoscopic depth were manipulated. Additionally, stereoscopic surfaces were added to examine the effects of surface structure on grouping. Mai...

This chapter contains three tutorial overviews of theoretical and methodological ideas that are important to students of visual perception. From the vast scope of the material we could have covered, we have chosen a small set of topics that form the foundations of vision research. To help fill the inevitable gaps, we have provided pointers to the l...

This entry includes the following topics: beauty and art as social constructions; beauty and art as evolutionary adaptations; the adaptiveness of symmetry and beauty; is the appeal of the golden section universal; is optimal arousal the general principle of aesthetic appeal; artistic production in children; making before matching; the difficulty of...

This chapter consists of tutorials on three theoretical and methodological issues in visual perception: (a) Foundational questions: the functions of vision, the relationship between percepts and visual neurons, the concept of information, the notion of representation and representational transformation, the relationship between perception and cogni...

In 1912, Max Wertheimer published his paper on phi motion, widely recognized as the start of Gestalt psychology. Because of its continued relevance in modern psychology, this centennial anniversary is an excellent opportunity to take stock of what Gestalt psychology has offered and how it has changed since its inception. We first introduce the key...

We perceive structure through a process of perceptual organization. Here we report a new perceptual organization phenomenon-the facilitation of visual grouping by global curvature. Observers viewed patterns that they perceived as organized into collections of curves. The patterns were perceptually ambiguous such that the perceived orientation of th...

We present a sceptical view of multimodal multistability--drawing most of our examples from the relation between audition and vision. We begin by summarizing some of the principal ways in which audio-visual binding takes place. We review the evidence that unambiguous stimulation in one modality may affect the perception of a multistable stimulus in...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by difficulty with the timing of movements. Data collected using the synchronization-continuation paradigm, an established motor timing paradigm, have produced varying results but with most studies finding impairment. Some of this inconsistency comes from variation in the medication state tested, in the int...

The proximity principle is a fundamental fact of spatial vision. It has been a cornerstone of the Gestalt approach to perception, it is supported by overwhelming empirical evidence, and its utility has been proven in studies of the ecological statistics of optical stimulation. We show, however, that the principle does not generalize to dynamic scen...

The purpose of this work is to describe how the visual system groups surfaces of unequal lightness under complex patterns of illumination. We propose that the Gestalt principle of Grouping by Regularity explains this process better than the more often cited principle of Grouping by Similarity. In our first experiment we demonstrate that in a percep...

We explored the nature of 37 spatial dimensions in Italian, such as LUNGO�CORTO (LONG-SHORT), INIZIO-FINE (BEGINNING-END), and CONVERGENTE-DIVERGENTE (CONVERGENT-DIVERGENT). In Study 1 we investigated their metric structure.We asked: (1) Are the extensions of the two poles (P1 and P2) the same? (2) What proportion of each dimension can be said to b...

Martin (2002) writes, “[I]ntrospection of one’s perceptual experience reveals only the mind-independent objects, qualities and relations that one learns about through perception. Experience is diaphanous or transparent to the objects of perception.”

Purpose. The propensity of successive discrete elements to be perceived as a single object in motion is called the strength of apparent motion (AM). We ask how space and time determine the strength of AM (SAM). There are two conflicting views on this matter. According to Korte's Third Law, if the temporal interval between the two elements is increa...

Rock et al. (Perception, 1992, 21, 779-789) showed that grouping can be computed post-constancy, after discounting a complex scene's variations in illumination. Unpublished studies by Kubovy and his co-workers have shown grouping among heterogeneous dots; hence, constant lightness is not a prerequisite for grouping. These experiments suggest that i...

In our work on grouping by proximity we noticed effects of lattice orientation on grouping by proximity. In a systematic study of this phenomenon, 25 observers (Os) were presented with 30 repetitions of a hexagonal lattice (in which dots are equidistant along three orientations, 120 degrees apart) at all possible orientations. In a phenomenological...

Grouping by proximity is one of several Gestalt principles that characterize the human visual system's propensity to perceptually organize an array of discrete elements. Previous work by Kubovy and colleagues (1995, 1998) showed that a ‘pure distance model’ (PDM) of grouping by proximity predicts the perceptual organization of all dot lattices (DLs...

Musicians disagree whether it is possible to produce notes of varying durations on percussion instruments. According to some, a longer physical gesture produces a longer note; others maintain gesture length in and of itself has no effect upon duration. In an attempt to reconcile these disparate viewpoints, we investigated the relative contribution...

We tested the perceptual reality of synaesthesia in two phases. During the first phase, four color-grapheme synaesthetes reported on the synaesthetically induced colors of the letters A-Z and the numbers 0–9 in two sessions. We computed consistency within and between the two sessions and identified letters and numbers whose colors are consistently...

In previous work we found that Korte's law and other characterizations of apparent motion are special cases of a simple new law (Gepshtein & Kubovy, 2003; Gepshtein, Kubovy, & Tyukin, under review), which is consistent with what is known about human sensitivity to continuous motion, summarized by Kelly's (1979) spatiotemporal threshold surface. Our...

We investigated the spontaneous perception of structure in random dot patterns (RDPs) and the role of the grouping principles of proximity, collinearity, and good-continuation. In three experiments observers reported the perceived organization in RDPs by either circling the groups they perceived or by clicking on the dots that appeared to belong to...

At VSS 2005 we reported that percussionists use visual gestures to alter audience perception of musical note length (Schutz & Kubovy). This conflicts with previous research suggesting vision does not alter auditory judgments of tone duration (Walker & Scott, 1981). In order to determine why our results differ from prior research, we built a point l...

In this paper we offer a theory of cross-modal objects. To begin, we discuss two kinds of linkages between vision and audition. The first is a duality. The the visual system detects and identifies emphsurfaces; the auditory system detects and identifies emphsources. Surfaces are illuminated by sources of light; sound is reflected off surfaces. Howe...

Schutz and Lipscomb (2007) reported an audiovisual illusion in which the length of the gesture used to produce a sound altered the perception of that sound's duration. This contradicts the widely accepted claim that the auditory system generally dominates temporal tasks because of its superior temporal acuity. Here, in the first of 4 experiments, w...

Contrary to the predictions of established theory, Schutz and Lipscomb (2007) have shown that visual information can influence the perceived duration of concurrent sounds. In the present study, we deconstruct the visual component of their illusion, showing that (1) cross-modal influence depends on visible cues signaling an impact event (namely, a s...

Although visual information is known to affect auditory perception in a variety of tasks, audition is generally believed to be relatively immune from visual influence when judging tone duration. However, Schutz and Lipscomb (2007) have shown that impact gestures influence the perceived duration of percussive sounds (i.e. the types of sounds general...

Research on the integration of auditory and visual sensory information consistently confirms the optimal integration hypothesis, according to which information is weighted according to its relative quality. Thus, since the auditory system has greater temporal resolution, this hypothesis predicts that visual information will not affect auditory judg...

Perceptual grouping is a multi-stage process, irreducible to a single mechanism localized anatomically or chronometrically. To understand how various grouping mechanisms interact, we combined a phenomenological report paradigm with high-density event-related potential (ERP) measurements, using a 256-channel electrode array. We varied the relative s...

The authors investigated whether the gestalt grouping principles can be quantified and whether the conjoint effects of two grouping principles operating at the same time on the same stimuli differ from the sum of their individual effects. After reviewing earlier attempts to discover how grouping principles interact, they developed a probabilistic m...

The proximity principle is a fundamental fact of spatial vision. It has been a cornerstone of the Gestalt approach to perception, it is supported by overwhelming empirical evidence, and its utility has been proven in studies of the ``ecological statistics" of optical stimulation. We show that the principle fails in the perception of motion, which m...

We video‐recorded isolated marimba notes performed by a world‐renowned percussionist attempting to produce long (L) and short (S) notes. We generated audio‐visual stimuli by crossing the video components of these notes. Subjects rated the duration of sounds presented in the audio‐alone (A), and in the audio‐visual (AV) condition (in the latter, the...

Neural systems face the challenge of optimizing their performance with limited resources, just as economic systems do. Here, we use tools of neoclassical economic theory to explore how a frugal visual system should use a limited number of neurons to optimize perception of motion. The theory prescribes that vision should allocate its resources to di...

Visual apparent motion is the experience of motion from the successive stimulation of separate spatial locations. How spatial and temporal distances interact to determine the strength of apparent motion has been controversial. Some studies report space-time coupling: If we increase spatial or temporal distance between successive stimuli, we must al...

Considerable evidence supports the idea that perceptual organization happens late. This paper undermines this view and provides evidence that perceptual organization happens at an early stage of information processing. I report on six experiments in which a second-choice paradigm borrowed from early studies of signal detection was used (and provide...

The authors conducted 3 experiments to explore the roles of curvature, density, and relative proximity in the perceptual organization of ambiguous dot patterns. To this end, they developed a new family of regular dot patterns that tend to be perceptually grouped into parallel contours, dot-sampled structured grids (DSGs). DSGs are similar to the do...

Phenomenology is the study of how the world (material, mental, or cultural) appears to me. Given the common view of scientific observation as objective, unaffected by a point of view, it is natural that controversy exists over the role of phenomenology in science.

Percussionists have long disagreed whether it is possible to use gesture length to control note duration on the marimba when other factors (angle of attack, mallet placement, mallet speed, etc.) are held constant. Some percussionists such as Buster Bailey feel gesture length can control note length, whereas others, such as Leigh Howard Stevens, con...

Perceptual multistability has often been explained using the concepts of adaptation and hysteresis. In this paper we show that effects that would typically be accounted for by adaptation and hysteresis can be explained without assuming the existence of dedicated mechanisms for adaptation and hysteresis. Instead, our data suggest that perceptual mul...

PURPOSE The propensity of successive discrete elements to be perceived as a single object in motion is called the strength of apparent motion (AM). We ask how space and time determine the strength of AM (SAM). There are two conflicting views on this matter. According to Korte's Third Law, if the temporal interval between the two elements is increas...

In our work on grouping by proximity we noticed effects of lattice orientation on grouping by proximity. In a systematic study of this phenomenon, 25 observers (Os) were presented with 30 repetitions of a hexagonal lattice (in which dots are equidistant along three orientations, 120 degrees apart) at all possible orientations. In a phenomenological...

Musicians disagree whether it is possible to produce notes of varying durations on percussion instruments. According to some, a longer physical gesture produces a longer note; others maintain gesture length in and of itself has no effect upon duration. In an attempt to reconcile these disparate viewpoints, we investigated the relative contribution...

Grouping by proximity is one of several Gestalt principles that characterize the human visual system's propensity to perceptually organize an array of discrete elements. Previous work by Kubovy and colleagues (1995, 1998) showed that a `pure distance model' (PDM) of grouping by proximity predicts the perceptual organization of all dot lattices (DLs...

We tested the perceptual reality of synaesthesia in two phases. During the first phase, four color-grapheme synaesthetes reported on the synaesthetically induced colors of the letters A--Z and the numbers 0--9 in two sessions. We computed consistency within and between the two sessions and identified letters and numbers whose colors are consistentl...

Rock et al. (emphPerception, 1992, emph21, 779--789) showed that grouping can be computed post-constancy, after discounting a complex scene's variations in illumination. Unpublished studies by Kubovy and his co-workers have shown grouping among heterogeneous dots; hence, constant lightness is not a prerequisite for grouping. These experiments sugge...

this article. To make a long story short, they faced two problems, both of which were most severe when #b# was large: low probabilities for responses c and d, and larger probablities for response d than for response c. There was little they could do about the first problem

iewing multistable figures (reviewed in Leopold & Logothetis, 1999 and Blake & Logothetis, 2002) we understand some of the mechanisms responsible for perceptual selection. Several interpretations of a multistable stimulus are represented in the visual cortical activity concurrently, even though only one of the alternatives is perceived at a time. H...

The purpose of this paper is to bring the psychology of perception to bear on the characterization of regular patterns that repeat themselves in one dimension, i.e., band designs. The classification of patterns is not concerned with the shape of motifs or their arrangement, but with the isometries that move a pattern along an axis or around a point...

Two kinds of rifts separate perceptual researchers: theoretical and modality-specific. Theoretical rifts divide modality-specific communities, and modality-specific rifts divide theoretical communities. Each group seeks to understand perception, but each uses such different approaches that synthesis into one coherent theory has been impossible. Her...

Symmetry properties have been shown to determine the perceived complexity of certain patterns. We used a paired-comparison method to obtain judgments of relative complexity for a family of two-dimensional regular patterns called band patterns. Although the complexity of these patterns is well predicted by their symmetry properties we were unable to...

We explore experimental methods used to study the phenomena of perceptual organization, first studied by the Gestalt psychologists. We describe an application of traditional psychophysics to perceptual organization and offer alternative methods. Among these, we distinguish two approaches that use multistable stimuli: (1) phenomenological psychophys...

Neuhoff (in press) has criticized Kubovy's (1981) Theory of Indispensable Attributes (TIA), which is the one of the building blocks of Kubovy and Van Valkenburg's (2001) theory of auditory objecthood. Specifically, he claims that (1) "simple frequency separation does not ensure the formation of auditory objects" and that (2) "frequency variation is...

This chapter consists of three tutorial overviews of important theoretical and methodological issues in the field of visual perception: First we discuss eight foundational questions that have shaped the principal theoretical approaches to visual perception. We consider the functions of vision, the relationship between percepts and visual neurons, t...

The eyes in a portrait often seem to follow observers as they pass (the Mona Lisa effect). All 3-D objects in a picture, not only gaze, will rotate in virtual space as the observer moves past the picture (Rosinski & Farber, 1980). This phenomenon is predicted by the geometry of pictorial space (See Rogers, 1995, for a review) but it may also be due...

Shepard has supposed that the mind is stocked with innate knowledge of the world and that this knowledge figures prominently in the way we see the world. According to him, this internal knowledge is the legacy of a process of internalization; a process of natural selection over the evolutionary history of the species. Shepard has developed his prop...

Notions of objecthood have traditionally been cast in visuocentric terminology. As a result, theories of auditory and cross-modal perception have focused more on the differences between modalities than on the similarities. In this paper we re-examine the concept of an object in a way that overcomes the limitations of the traditional perspective. We...

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Shepard has supposed that the mind is stocked with innate knowledge of the world and that this knowledge figures prominently in the way we see the world. According to him, this internal knowledge is the legacy of a process of internalization; a process of natural selection over the evolutionary history of the species. Shepard has developed his prop...

It is natural to think that in perceiving dynamic scenes, vision takes a series of snapshots. Motion perception can ensue when the snapshots are different. The snapshot metaphor suggests two questions: (i) How does the visual system put together elements within each snapshot to form objects? This is the spatial grouping problem. (ii) When the snaps...

The Gestalt phenomena of grouping in space and in space-time (proximity, similarity, good continuation, common fate, apparent motion and so on) are an essential foundation of perception. Yet they have remained fairly vague, experimentally intractable, and unqualified. We describe progress we made in the quest for clarity, lawfulness and precision i...

The importance of perceptual organization (also called feature grouping) in biological vision systems is well-known. The use of perceptual organizational principles, typically based on principles first enumerated in the 1920s by the Gestalt psychologists, has also begun to appear in recent work in computer vision. However, very little of this work...

To analyze visual scenes, the visual system decomposes the visual scene into features that are processed in parallel by separate subsystems. Certain theories (Treisman, Wolfe) propose that these subsystems function independently before focal attention integrates their output. We describe a new paradigm-the gestalt detection task--that directly asse...

Pylyshyn is willing to assume that attention can influence feature integration. We argue that he concedes too much. Feature integration occurs preattentively, except in the case of certain “perverse” displays, such as those used in feature-conjunction searches.

Viewed from the center of projection, a perspective picture presents the pictorial depth information of a scene. Knowing the center of projection, one can reconstruct the depicted scene. Assuming another viewpoint is the center of projection will cause one to reconstruct a transformed scene. Despite these transformations, we appreciate pictures fro...