Abstract: Background
Human can extract effective visual information from the external world since we have an extremely strong, yet complicated visual perceptual system in our brain in addition to our visual system. Visual perception can be described as the way brain interprets what the eyes see. There are two most basic thinking in the study of perception to answer the most fundemental question of “Where visual processing begins?” . One is called “feature analysis”, the other one is called “holistic registration”.
In 1982, Chen Lin, a Chinese cognitive expert, proposed the “early topological perception” theory to support the holistic registration theory which holds that global topological perception is prior to the perception of other featural properties, and the primitives of visual form perception are geometric invariants at different levels of structural stability. Early topological perception predicts the visual sensitivity to distinction made in topology which including holes, inside/outside relation, and ‘‘presence vs. absence''. Chen provided experimental data of adult subjects to support the hypothesis of early topological perception,which led to a major finding that the relative perceptual salience of different geometric properties is remarkably consistent with the hierarchy of geometries according to Klein‘s Erlangen program (Figure 1), which is a mathematical framework for describing geometrical properties with respect to form stability.