Visual holes (cutouts in a surface) have recently intrigued vision scientists as interesting and useful stimuli in the studies of shape perception and as a perceptual conundrum regarding figure/ground organization. Adopting the Bouba/Kiki paradigm, this study addressed a controversial issue of whether the perceived shape of a closed region alters when the region changes from a solid object to an empty hole, in a more direct manner than previous studies did. Observers were presented with two doughnut-like cardboard cutouts, one with a flower-shaped hole and the other with a star-shaped hole, and then matched them with two nonsense words. The curvature profile of the hole boundary was manipulated so that the shape of the interior region (i.e., a hole) and that of the exterior region (i.e., material edges) give rise to opposite shape impressions (i.e., one rounded and the other spiky). The results of Experiment 1 revealed that shape-name matching for holed objects is based on the interior shapes of holes, but not those of materially defined inner edges. The following three experiments replicated the same pattern of results even when holes appeared like oral apertures in animal character faces (Experiments 2-3) and when they were irregular, non-symmetric, and low in semantic association with familiar real-world objects (Experiment 4). Lastly, Experiment 5 showed that shape-name matching for "C"-shaped, negative-part stimuli is also interior-shape-based if the opening of the interior region is relatively small. These findings suggest that the interior shapes of holes are automatically accessible. I conclude with a discussion of my hypothesis that the only global-level, unitary shape representation of a bounded region of a single connected surface is that of the interior region for both objects and holes, imposing an important constraint in visual shape processing.

中文翻译：

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物体内部的Bouba和Kiki：带孔物体的声音形状对应。

视觉孔（表面上的切口）最近引起了视觉科学家的兴趣，它们是形状感知研究中有趣而有用的刺激，并且是关于人物/地面组织的知觉难题。这项研究采用Bouba / Kiki范式，以比以前的研究更为直接的方式解决了一个有争议的问题，即当区域从固体物体变为空洞时，封闭区域的感知形状是否会发生变化。为观察者提供了两个类似甜甜圈的硬纸板切口，一个带有花形孔，另一个带有星形孔，然后将它们与两个无意义的单词相匹配。操纵孔边界的曲率轮廓，以便内部区域（即孔）的形状和外部区域（即材料边缘）的形状产生相反的形状印象（即 ，一个圆角，另一个尖角）。实验1的结果表明，带孔物体的形状名称匹配基于孔的内部形状，而不是材料上定义的内部边缘的形状。以下三个实验重复了相同的结果模式，即使当孔出现在动物角色的脸上像口腔一样（实验2-3），并且它们是不规则，不对称且与熟悉的现实世界对象的语义联系较低时（实验） 4）。最后，实验5表明，如果内部区域的开口相对较小，则与“ C”形负部分刺激的形状名称匹配也是基于内部形状的。这些发现表明，孔的内部形状是可以自动访问的。最后，我对以下假设进行了讨论：唯一的全球层面，