An inability to perceptually organize a figure leads to confusion and/or incorrect recognition.
There are five possible outcomes of the perceptual process:
1. An inability to organize (and recognize) the stimulus. When this occurs, the outcome is total confusion or a incorrect guess. In the picture of the bearded face, for example, many students see only splotches of black and white. Others see erroneous pieces of odd shapes such as rabbits, sheep etc. I always see images of Marilyn Monroe.
2. An inability to organize the stimulus in a timely fashion.
When this occurs recognition is achieved but it may come too late to be useful. This was always my experience in my beginning Russian class during our vocabulary dictation tests.
(Please don‰t ask me if I can speak Russian. All I ever was able to do was ask where the bathroom was, and that with a heavy English drawl in distorted Russian phonemes. In the time it would take any Russian listener to close in on that message, I would find myself in deep trouble)!