The ability to differentiate visually between an object and its background.

A person's ability to separate an object from its surrounding visual field is referred to as figure-ground perception. The object that a person focuses on is called the figure; everything else is referred to as background, or simply ground.

Psychologists have created different kinds of stimuli in order to study how people separate figure from ground. In some cases, these stimuli involve simple ambiguous figures like the famous face-vase figure that can be interpreted as two faces looking at one another or a goblet, depending on what aspect a person focuses on. In other situations, complex stimuli can be used to demonstrate figure-ground relationships. For example, the 3-D Magic Eye pictures involve relaxing the muscles of the eyes to see a...