Salience of Tops:

Viewers Preferentially Attend to the Tops of Figures

Ken W. Chambers, Michael K. McBeath, Diane J. Schiano

In  three experiments observers matched or sorted random polygons, and exhibited a consistent bias to favor grouping of common top features over bottom features.  We suggest that this bias reflects a natural tendency for objects to have a reliable world coordinate orientation from which tops are more informative than bottoms.  Our results are consistent with many eye-tracking and orientation-judging findings, and appear to indicate a further orientation-defining perceptual predisposition.