GESTALT THEORY © 2012 (ISSN 0170-057 X) Vol. 34, No. 3/4, 297-314 Mary A. Peterson, Laura Cacciamani, Andrew J. Mojica & J. L. Sanguinetti Meaning Can Be Accessed For The Ground Side of A Figure People readily perceive and act upon objects, but before objects are perceived, perceptual processes operate to organize the visual input into coherent units. One function of perceptual organization is to determine which borders in the visual feld are bounding edges of objects or surfaces, which are borders of patterns or shadows, and which are corners formed by the intersection of two planar surfaces. Tose that are deemed to be bounding edges of objects are perceived as separate entities at diferent distances from the viewer. Te near entity appears to be shaped, or confgured, by the border (this is the fgure); the far entity appears shapeless near the border it shares with the fgure and appears to continue behind it as a local background, or ground. Tere has been much debate regarding what factors infuence fgure and ground assignment and when and where it occurs in the visual processing hierarchy. Early in the 20 th century, the leaders of the Berlin school of Gestalt Psychology (e.g., Kofka, Köhler, and Wertheimer) argued that inborn responses to image features such as convexity, enclosure, small area, and symmetry produced the frst fgure assignment, and that factors such as past experience and meaning could exert an infuence only after those “autochthonous” image features determined the initial percept. Tus, in their view, fgure-ground assignment occurred early in a serial processing hierarchy. Although some contemporaries of the Berlin Gestaltists (e.g., Rubin 1915/1958; Sander, 1930) held that past experience with a stimulus and/or its meaning infuenced the way it was perceived, the Berlin school’s majority view prevailed and served as the basis for a foundational assumption held by most visual perception researchers during the 20 th century – the assumption that stored structural and semantic representations of previously seen objects are accessed only after the initial perceptual organization is determined. Tis assumption entails that these higher-level representations are accessed only for fgures, and not for grounds. Tis majority Gestalt position was buttressed by their demonstrations that fgure assignment could occur for novel displays where past experience and meaning could not play a role, and later by Julesz’s (1971) evidence that binocular disparity alone was sufcient for the perception of depth and form in random-dot stereograms. 1 1 Note, however, that evidence that fgure-ground perception can occur without infuence from past experi- ence and meaning does not constitute evidence that it always occurs without such infuences (Peterson, 1999).