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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Gestalt processing in late-sighted children and deep neural networks

Lukas Vogelsang¹, Marin Vogelsang¹, Priti Gupta, Pragya Shah, Purva Sethi, Stutee Narang, Suma Ganesh, Pawan Sinha¹; ¹Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Presenter: Lukas Vogelsang

Holistic perceptual organization guided by Gestalt principles like similarity in luminance, color, or form is critical for organizing complex visual scenes. Past studies have demonstrated the development of these abilities in infancy. How important is visual experience during these early years for the emergence of Gestalt processing? Does visual deprivation during this period permanently compromise perceptual grouping? Using tasks validated previously with normally-sighted infants, we assessed perceptual grouping from immediately pre-surgery to several months afterward. Late-sighted patients showed persistently poor performance across all Gestalt cues tested, despite longitudinal gains in other visual functions. Computational simulations using deep neural networks trained with typical or atypical developmental acuity trajectories tested the role of early visual degradations characteristic of normal development. Although early degradations enhanced holistic processing in more naturalistic assessments, the benefits for explicit Gestalt processing were very modest. These findings underscore the critical role of early visual experience in developing perceptual organization, reveal important deficits from early deprivation, and suggest new avenues for future computational work.

Topic Area: Visual Processing & Computational Vision

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