Multiple completions primed by occlusion patterns.

There is a strong tendency to complete a partly occluded shape. Two types of pattern completion, global and local, are frequently reported. By means of the primed-matching paradigm, it has previously been shown that global completions are prevalent for stimuli in which regularity is abundantly present. In our study the primed-matching paradigm is applied to such stimuli in order to find out whether the rival local completion is generated as well. Therefore anomalous completions are added to the experimental design. Priming effects both on global and on local completions are compared with priming effects on those anomalous completions. The data indeed suggest that the occlusion patterns evoked not only a global but also a local completion.