Time course of amodal completion in face perception

The visual system often automatically perceives partially occluded objects as whole and complete. This phenomenon is called amodal completion, but its mechanism is not fully understood. In the first experiment, we measured the psychophysical time course of face amodal completion using a performance-based method and found the amodal completion took place between 100 and 300 ms after stimulus onset. In the second experiment, we found the amodal completion could modulate event-related potentials (ERPs) in the same time range. These results provide further evidence regarding the representational development of occluded faces from local facial features to a coherent face. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.