Tandra Ghose (Univ. of Kasierslautern, Germany), in collaboration with Frouke Hermens (Univ. of Aberdeen, U.K.) and Johan Wagemans (Univ. of Leuven, Belgium)

Funded by European Union Marie Curie Career Integration Grant

Project No. 293901

We consciously experience the world as made up of complete objects, e.g. a house behind a tree, and not a juxtaposition of colored blobs and edges. The process by which the brain transforms visual input on the retina into coherent objects is called perceptual organization, and understanding this process is a fundamental scientific problem. Despite of the efforts, very little progress has been made in understanding the representations and processes underlying perceptual organization, more specifically in understanding of how coherent percept arises from the discrete samples that are collected by eye movements. The major goal of this project (POEM) is to investigate the missing link, i.e., the link between discrete eye-movements and holistic perceptual organization.

Connection between Perceptual Organization (PO) and Eye Movements (EM) will be investigated at three levels of processing explicit (ePOEM), implicit (iPOEM) and functional (fPOEM).

• ePOEM: Visual correlates of PO from explicit EM (work in progress)
• iPOEM: Quantitative measures of PO from implicit modulation of EM (2011-2013 results)
• fPOEM: Correlations between PO-aesthetics and functional ease of EM (work in progress)
• Dissemination of results: Conferences, Workshops, Public lecture series, Publications, etc