Seeing fruit on trees: enhanced perceptual dissimilarity from multiple ambiguous neural representations

Perceptual grouping contributes to the resolution of visual ambiguity of multiple spatially separate regions in view by enhancing their perceptual similarity. Here, the same ambiguous neural representations are shown also to enhance perceived dissimilarity among the regions. Two separated equiluminant gratings were made ambiguous by introducing rivalry for one of two of their features: orientation or chromaticity. Observers perceived two gratings (above and below fixation) to be different in both color and orientation more often than chance. Overall, a disambiguating process was found to select often for maximal perceived dissimilarity between two objects.