Influence of past experience on perceptual grouping

We used primed matching to examine the microgenesis of perceptual organization for familiar (upright letters) and unfamiliar (inverted letters) visual configurations that varied in the connectedness between their line components. The configurations of upright letters were available for priming as early as 40 ms, irrespective of connectedness between their line components. The configurations of connected inverted-letter primes were also available this early, but the configurations of disconnected inverted letters were not available until later These results show that past experience contributes to the early grouping of disconnected line segments into configurations. These findings suggest an interactive model of perceptual organization in which both image-based properties (e.g., connectedness) and input from object memories contribute to perceptual organization.