  Victor Vasarely (1906-1997)and his important legacy to the study of human
perception are brought to the forefront and discussed. A large part of his
impressive work conveys the appearance of striking three-dimensional shapes and
structures in a large-scale pictorial plane. Current perception science
explains such effects by invoking brain mechanisms for the processing of
monocular (2D) depth cues. Here in this study, we illustrate and explain local
effects of 2D color and contrast cues on the perceptual organization in terms
of figure-ground assignments, i.e. which local surfaces are likely to be seen
as nearer or bigger in the image plane. Paired configurations are embedded in a
larger, structurally ambivalent pictorial context inspired by some of Vasarelys
creations. The figure-ground effects the configurations produce reveal a
significant correlation between perceptual solutions for nearer and bigger when
other monocular depth cues are not provided. In consistency with previous
findings on similar, albeit simpler visual displays, a specific color may
compete with luminance contrast to resolve the planar ambiguity of a complex
pattern context at a critical point in the hierarchical resolution of
figure-ground uncertainty. The potential role of color temperature in this
process is brought forward here. Vasarely intuitively understood and
successfully exploited the subtle context effects accounted for in this paper,
well before empirical investigation had set out to study and explain them in
terms of information processing by the visual brain.
