Figure 8.23 Support for Biederman’s recognition-by-components theory Part (a) shows an airplane consisting of nine, four, or two components (geons). Even with just a few components present, it is recognizable. Part (b) shows a set of line drawings of objects degraded in two different ways. The degradation in the middle column preserves the connections between adjacent components, and that in the right-hand column does not. When subjects saw the degraded figures alone, they recognized those in the middle column but not those in the right-hand column.
(Adapted from Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding. Psychological Review, 94(2), 115-147 Copyright © American Psychological Association.)