Segregation of an image into figure and ground is an important step in visual processing. Two new papers show that responses in human and monkey brain areas known to be involved in shape ...

If you imagine a white heart on a black background, for example, the heart is the "figure" -- with its definitive shape -- and the black background is the "ground," which seems to simply continue ...

Willingham suggests it might be more useful to figure out similarities in how our brains learn, rather than differences. And, in that case, he says, there's a lot of common ground. For example ...