There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
We studied the speed with which observers could detect symmetry in drawings that incorporated
symmetric contours--related by reflection or translation--within single objects or
across different objects. We asked observers to perform a speeded decision whether
pairs of contours are the same, i.e., related by reflection or by translation, or
different. When the contours belong to a single object, observers are faster to see
the relation between contours when they are related by reflection than by translation.
When the contours belong to different objects, observers are faster to see the relation
between the contours when they are related by translation than by reflection. We tested
whether this advantage of translation is due to a lock-and-key process. We first tested
our hypothesis by manipulating the correspondence of the features, so as to make matching
more difficult. This change did not produce the predicted pattern of results. We performed
a second manipulation to change the appearance of the objects: we increased the prägnanz
of the objects by changing the type of lines used to connect the contours. Results
indicate that perceptual organization can alter detectability of symmetry.