LOCAL AND GLOBAL PROCESSES IN VISUAL COMPLETION

In the natural environment, objects are frequently occluded, and people continuously complete partly occluded objects. Do local processes or global processes control the completion of partly occluded objects? To answer this question, most previous studies simply asked subjects to draw the completions they ''saw.'' Such drawing tasks are highly subjective, and they provide equivocal results. Our studies are the first to use an objective, implicit paradigm (primed matching) to determine the extent to which local or global processes underlie the visual completion of partly occluded objects. Our results suggest that global processes dominate perceptual completion, whereas local processes do not play a large role. Therefore, local theories of completion, or theories in which local processes dominate, cannot be entirely correct.