Figure Ground

Graduate Faculty Psychology Bulletin Volume 2, No. 2, 2004

Examining the Effect of Subliminal Priming on Ambiguous Figure Perception
Misa Tsuruta, M.A.1

Abstract ~ Figure-ground organization is a kind of perceptual organization that has been studied in Gestalt psychology. Ambiguous/reversible figures can evoke two different percepts. When we see ambiguous figures, sooner or later our perceptual system determines one side that stands out as the figure, while the other side forms the ground and becomes shapeless. Subjects were subliminally trained with the half-figures of the target
1: Department of Psychology, Graduate Faculty, New School University, New York, USA An extended version of this paper served as partial fullfillment for the requirements of Research Methods at New School University Acknowledgments: I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Arien Mack for her patient instruction on the subject of perceptual organization. Moreover, without the continuous help of Zissis Pappas this project could literally not have been completed. A friendly thank you to Keiko Yashima, who created the figures used in the experiment. My last thank you goes to my husband, Masayoshi Tsuruta, who gave me a brief introduction to Gestalt psychology many years ago. Address correspondence to Misa Tsuruta, [e-mail]

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Effect of Subliminal Priming

ambiguous figures and then presented with the target figures. The result demonstrated above-chance level of consistency between the prime and the choice of the figure. From this result, it was concluded that subliminal priming of the figure had effects on figure-ground organization. Introduction In the investigation of visual perception, Gestalt psychologists made an indispensable contribution by asserting that perceptual processes were not simply determined by separate elements in visual stimuli (Peterson, 1999; Mack, Tang, Tuma, Kahn, & Rock, 1992). Those elements are not

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