Reification

In Gestalt psychology, reification is the perceptual phenomenon in which the object a person consciously experiences contains more explicit spatial detail than is actually present in the raw sensory stimulus reaching the eye, meaning the visual system actively constructs additional structure that the incoming image itself does not literally contain. It is counted among a small set of core organizing principles, alongside multistability and invariance, used to describe how the visual system builds a single, structured perceptual experience out of sensory information that is, on its own, genuinely ambiguous or incomplete.