One characteristic of human visual perception is the presence of Gestalt phenomena,' that is, that the whole is something other than the sum of its parts. A natural question is whether image-recognition networks show similar effects. Our paper investigates one particular type of Gestalt phenomenon, the law of closure, in the context of a feedforward image classification neural network (NN). This is a robust effect in human perception, but experiments typically rely on measurements (e.g., reaction time) that are not available for artificial neural nets. We describe a protocol for identifying closure effect in NNs, and report on the results of experiments with simple visual stimuli. Our findings suggest that NNs trained with natural images do exhibit closure, in contrast to networks with randomized weights or networks that have been trained on visually random data. Furthermore, the closure effect reflects something beyond good feature extraction; it is correlated with the network's higher layer features and ability to generalize.
The key idea of the Gestalt psychology school is that we perceive individual sensory stimuli as meaningful wholes @cite_19 . Further, the Gestalt psychologists maintained that when sensory elements are combined, the elements form a new pattern or configuration. For example, when you hear musical notes, a melody emerges from their combinations, something that did not exist in individual elements. In other words, the whole is different from the sum of its parts @cite_42 . This overarching idea explains many phenomena of human perception @cite_19 , one of which is illusory contours (set Illusory in Fig. ); the brain has a need to see familiar simple objects and has a tendency to create a whole'' image from individual elements.
@cite_19 @cite_42
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Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses and nuances of colour. Do I have "327"? No. I have sky, house, and trees. It is impossible to achieve "327 " as such. And yet even though such droll calculation were possible and implied, say, for the house 120, the trees 90, the sky 117 -I should at least have this arrangement and division of the total, and not, say, 127 and 100 and 100; or 150 and 177. Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.