Abstract

Our complex visual environment is constrained by natural geometric regularities, including spatiotem-poral regularity, co-linearity and co-circularity. To investigate human visual processing associated withthese regularities we directly compared the neural processes in encoding dynamic co-linearity and co-circularity using event-related potentials (ERPs). By recording ERPs to a target bar presented alone (nocontext) or in a dynamic sequence of bars following a co-linear or co-circular path, we observed earlierERPs to targets embedded in co-linear sequence at early (66 ms) and later stages (197 ms) of post-targetprocessing. In contrast, targets in co-circular sequence only modulated ERPs at later stages of processing.It is proposed that early visual processing may have adapted to efficiently process co-linearity to improvetarget identification, whereas sensitivity to co-circularity does not occur until later stages of processing.These results have significant impact for understanding brain-behaviour relationships when processingnatural geometric regularities.