Perceiving Topological Relations
研究人类是否快速自动感知拓扑关系，通过六个实验发现简单拓扑特征影响物体匹配、数量估计和视觉搜索等任务，提出拓扑关系可能是视觉基本元素。
There are many ways to describe and represent the visuospatial world. A space can be described by its euclidean properties—the size of objects, the angles of boundaries, the distances between them. A space can also be described in nonspatial terms: One could explain the layout of a city by the order of its streets. Somewhere in between, topological representations —such as those commonly depicted in public-transit maps—capture coarse relational structure without precise euclidean detail, offering a relatively efficient, low-dimensional way of capturing spatial content. Here, we ask whether human adults quickly and automatically perceive such relations. In six experiments, we show that differences in simple topological features influence a range of visual tasks from object matching to number estimation to visual search. We discuss the possibility that topological relations are a kind of visual primitive that supports visuospatial representation.