Accentuation as a Mechanism of Visual Illusions: Insights from Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART)

This study introduces and examines the principle of accentuation as a novel mechanism in perceptual organization, analyzing its effects through the framework of Grossberg’s Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART). We demonstrate that localized accentuators, manifesting as minimal dissimilarities or discontinuities, can significantly modulate global perceptions, inducing illusions of geometric distortion, orientation shifts, and apparent motion. Through a series of phenomenological experiments, we establish that accentuation can supersede classical Gestalt principles, influencing figure-ground segregation, shape perception, and lexical processing. Our findings suggest that accentuation functions as an autonomous organizing principle, leveraging salience-driven attentional capture to generate perceptual effects. We then apply the ART model to elucidate these phenomena, focusing on its core constructs of complementary computing, boundary–surface interactions, and resonant states. Specifically, we show how accentuation-induced asymmetries in boundary signals within the boundary contour system (BCS) can propagate through laminar cortical circuits, biasing figure-ground assignments and shape representations. The interaction between these biased signals and top–down expectations, as modeled by ART’s resonance mechanisms, provides a neurally plausible account for the observed illusions. This integration of accentuation effects with ART offers novel insights into the neural substrates of visual perception and presents a unifying theoretical framework for a diverse array of perceptual phenomena, bridging low-level feature processing with high-level cognitive representations.