Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A connectionist model was developed to investigate the relationship between global and local information in visual perception, and an experiment tested a prediction generated by the model. The research focused on the fact that processing of global information is found to dominate processing of local information in many tasks ("global precedence"). The connectionist model demonstrated that global precedencecan arise out of simple parallel processing. The experintent demonstrated that rotating global elements eliminates Global Precedence. This empirical result supports the possibility, raised by the model, that Global Precedence is due in part to simplicity of Input-Output mapping.