The shape of an object is fundamental in object recognition but it is still an open issue to what extent shape differences are perceived analytically (i.e., by the dimensional structure of the shapes) or holistically (i.e., by the overall similarity of the shapes). The dimensional structure of a stimulus is available in a primary stage of…

Our first review article (Wagemans et al., 2012) on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Gestalt psychology focused on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. It concluded that further progress requires a reconsideration of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which is provided here. In…

In recent studies, researchers have discovered a larger neural activation for stimuli that are more extreme exemplars of their stimulus class, compared with stimuli that are more prototypical. This has been shown for faces as well as for familiar and novel shape classes. We used a visual search task to look for a behavioral correlate of these…