The minimum principle and visual pattern completion

Summary The minimum principle states that a perceiver will see the simplest possible interpretation of a pattern. Some theorists of human perception take this principle as a core-explanatory concept. Others hold the view that a perceptual minimum principle is untenable. In two recent extensive surveys of the relevant literature a more differentiated position is taken: the minimum principle is not renounced in a definite way. In the research reported here, an intuitively appealing specification of a minimum principle is tested. An experiment on visual pattern completion was performed in which patterns were presented to subjects who traced the contours of the shapes they saw. It was predicted that there would be a preference for interpretations that describe a pattern as a set of separate shapes with minimal information load as computed by Leeuwenberg's coding language. However, only half of the responses given by the subjects were predicted by this specification of a minimum principle. It was further demonstrated that locally complex interpretations of junctions of contour elements are easily made, but not in order to attain globally minimal interpretations.