The contribution of shape features and demographic variables to disembedding abilities

Humans typically perceive visual patterns in a global manner, and are remarkably capable of extracting object shapes based on properties such as proximity, closure, symmetry, and good continuation. Notwithstanding people’s attitude toward perceptual grouping, the research highlighted differences in disembedding performance across individuals, summarized by the field dependence/independence dimension. Previous studies revealed that age and educational attainment explain part of this variability, whereas the role of sex is still highly debated. Also, which stimulus features primarily influence inter-individual variations in perceptual grouping has to be fully determined.Building upon these premises, we assessed the role of age, level of education and sex on performance at the Leuven-Embedded Figure Test - a proxy of disembedding abilities - in a sample of 391 cisgender individuals. We also investigated whether stimulus symmetry, closure, complexity, and continuation relate to task accuracy as a function of personal characteristics.Overall, target asymmetry and continuation with the embedding context increase task difficulty, whereas target complexity demonstrates a U-shaped relationship with disembedding performance. Further, results unveil sex differences that have not been reported so far in adults and support the association between age, educational attainment, and disembedding abilities. Male individuals also benefit more from target symmetry and closure and are better at recognizing shapes when the embedding context is challenging. Lastly, highly educated adults better recognize asymmetrical and open targets, as well as shapes embedded in complex contexts. Taken together, our findings show how shape features relate to individual characteristics in explaining field independence.