Work

The past, present, and future of relation perception.

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: , "Familiar Interacting Object Pairs Are Perceptually Grouped." At first glance, the subject matter of Green and Hummel's article appears quite simple and mundane: actions like pouring coffee, cutting bread, or unlocking a door. Yet hidden at the core of such everyday routines are specific functional relationships between objects, such as a carafe and a mug, a knife and a loaf, or a key and a lock. Green and Hummel's article was a turning point in a long but sparse tradition of research that had considered such relations from a vision-science perspective (e.g., Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000; Ullman, 1984), as it steered many researchers-ourselves included-to explore questions in the burgeoning field now known as "relation perception." This field advances the idea that, beyond objects, features, and locations, the visual system spontaneously or automatically extracts and represents relations-properties that specify interactions or connections between objects, rather than each object's individual characteristics. In this perspective article, we outline new aspects of human visual perception that have been the focus of this field and the major outstanding questions that remain (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance

DOI: 10.1037/xhp0001310

Authors: Alon Hafri, Liuba Papeo

Institutions: University of Delaware, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod

Language: English

Topic: Visual perception and processing mechanisms

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: European Commission

Award: G5840275258