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Updated: May 25, 2026

Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues
Published on: June 3, 2013
Perceptual wholes can reduce the conscious accessibility of their parts
Ervin Poljac1, Lee de-Wit, Johan Wagemans
1Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (K.U. Leuven), Belgium. Ervin.Poljac@psy.kuleuven.be
Abstract:
Humans can rapidly extract object and category information from an image despite surprising limitations in detecting changes to the individual parts of that image. In this article we provide evidence that the construction of a perceptual whole, or Gestalt, reduces awareness of changes to the parts of this object. This result suggests that the rapid extraction of a perceptual Gestalt, and the inaccessibility of the parts that make up that Gestalt, may in fact reflect two sides of the same coin whereby human vision provides only the most useful level of abstraction to conscious awareness.
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