Welcome

1/28/2004 slide 33

What Makes a Figure?
Ecologically Sensible and Tested

•Surroundedness

•Size (smaller)

•Vertically or horizontally orientated objects more likely to be figures

•Contrast (including of color and texture)

•Symmetry

•Convexity (bulging out vs. caving in)

•Parallelism (contours parallel)

•Familiarity

•NB: motion often dominates in real life and moving images


	Need to distinguish object (hungry tiger) from background (harmless grass) very quickly.

	We’ll be looking at some lower-level reason for calling one thing a figure and another ground in the next section of the talk.