• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.73-90
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• 2014

It has been suggested that primates' trichromatic color vision is an adaption for folivory and frugivory. Ripened fruit frequently is red against a green background. Given this, the question for our research was whether the ecological relationship between red and green plays any role in figure-ground organization that is an essential step in forming our perception of objects? In this study, it was tested which color looked most strong as a figure, using a red circle on a green background and a green circle on red background. The results of Experiment 1 showed that most participants saw the red circle for the figure more than the green circle. However, this effect was significant only in females, but not in males. Accordingly, this result suggests that the visual development of figure-ground organization based on red-green color combination may differ between males and females. In Experiment 2, it was surveyed that the results of Experiment 1 was simply not by the sex difference of color preference. The gender difference of the figure-ground organization on red-green stimuli are discussed in terms of some recent hypotheses such as gatherer-hunter hypothesis.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.355-376
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• 2016

We used holes defined by color similarity (Experiment 1) and binocular disparity (Experiment 2) to study how the inner contour of an object (i.e., boundary of a hole in it) is encoded in visual working memory. Many studies in VWM have shown that an object's boundary properties can be integrated with its surface properties via their shared spatial location, yielding an object-based encoding benefit. However, encoding of the hole contours has rarely been tested. We presented objects (squares or circles) containing a bar under a change detection paradigm, and relevant features to be remembered were the color of objects and the orientation of bars (or holes). If the contour of a hole belongs to the surrounding object rather than to the hole itself, the object-based feature binding hypothesis predicts that the shape of it can be integrated with color of an outer object, via their shared spatial location. Thus, in the hole display, change detection performance was expected to better than in the conjunction display where orientation and color features to be remembered were assigned to different parts of a conjunction object, and comparable to that in a single bar display where both orientation and color were assigned into a single bar. However, the results revealed that performance in the hole display did not differ from that in the conjunction display. This suggests that the shape of holes is not automatically encoded together with the surface properties of the outer object via object-based feature binding, but encoded independently from the surrounding object.