Development of perceptual completion originates in information acquisition
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 1, 2026

Creating Objects and Object Categories for Studying Perception and Perceptual Learning
Published on: November 2, 2012
Scott P Johnson1, Juliet Davidow, Cynthia Hall-Haro
1Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. sjohnson@psych.ucla.edu
Abstract:
Adults have little difficulty perceiving objects as complete despite occlusion, but newborn infants perceive moving partly occluded objects solely in terms of visible surfaces. The developmental mechanisms leading to perceptual completion have never been adequately explained. Here, the authors examine the potential contributions of oculomotor behavior and motion sensitivity to perceptual completion performance in individual infants. Young infants were presented with a center-occluded rod, moving back and forth against a textured background, to assess perceptual completion. Infants also participated in tasks to assess oculomotor scanning patterns and motion direction discrimination. Individual differences in perceptual completion performance were strongly correlated with scanning patterns but were unrelated to motion direction discrimination. The authors present a new model of development of perceptual completion that posits a critical role for targeted visual scanning, an early developing oculomotor action system.
Related Concept Videos
Perception
Bottom-up processing begins at the sensory level, where receptors detect external environmental stimuli. These could include the tactile sensation of...
Gestalt Principles of Perception
Vision
Parallel Processing
Depth Perception and Spatial Vision
Sensory Perception: Organization of the Somatosensory System
The receptor level:
The receptor level is the first stage of sensation. It involves the detection of a stimulus by specialized sensory receptors. The stimulus must arrive within the receptor's receptive field. Next, the receptor converts the energy of the stimulus...

