3 - Perception Flashcards
define perception
experiences that result from stimulation of the senses
what are some basic properties of perceptions
- they’re a process - something like reasoning but somewhat automatic
- perception occurs together with action
- perception plays a central role inn cognition in general - essential for creating memories and knnowleedfge, solving problems, communicating, etc.
what is the main issue with computers trying to perceive?
dont have all the knowledge that people do, we have a bunch of data that helps solve this problem
what are the difficulties in designing a perceiving machine? (4)
- stimulus ambiguity
- hidden or blurred objects
- varying view points
- scenes contain higher level information
explain stimulus ambiguity in perception
inverse projection problem - start from the stimulus on the eye and try to figure out what is causing it
- retinal images in this way can be created by more than one object
explain viewpoint invariance
the capacity to recognize an object from any perspective - very hard for computers
what is bottom up processing
the sequence of events that takes information from the eye and transmits it to the brain for processing
what is top down processing
bringing knowledge to bear on deliverances of bottom up processing
explain the ‘multiple personalities of blob’
can place the same blob into several blurred images and it appears to fit with each - ‘perceived as different objects depending on their orientation and the context within which they are seen’
what does the multiple personalities of blob tell us about why humans are superior to computers perceptually
the influence of top down processing on perception is easy for people but requires explicit programming in computers, so its hard to get gong
what are translational probabilities
the likelihood a sound with follow another within a word in a given language - computed implicitly by humans during language learning
what do we call the process of learning speech segmentation through translational probabilities
statistical learning - infants as young as 8 mo are capable of this
explain saffran’s study on stat learning in infants
4 nonsense words, produced in random strings with no break
- TP within words was always 1.0, between was always .33
- tested with three syllable stimuli, some of which were full words (that they’d heard already), others were part words
- kids would listen to part word for longer bc of habituation
- factual
Explain Helmoltz’ theory of unconscious inference
- what ‘principle’ is this based on?
- realized that the image on a retina is ambiguous
- how does the perceptual system decide that the patter was created by one over another possibility?
- likelihood principle - we perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the stimuli
- this is the unconscious inference
- relies one knowledge of the environment
Explain the Gestalt theory of perception and its justifications w reference to Wundt
- reject Wundt’s structuralism
- can’t explain the phenomena of apparent movement; nothing in between the two lights that shows us movement
- the whole is not the sum of its parts; led to the principles of perceptual organization
what are the main principles of perceptual organization?
- Good continuation
- pregnanz
- similarity
what is the principle of good continuation
- points that are best connected by a smooth or straight line are seen as a line, and this line tends to be perceived as following the smoothest path
- objects that are overlapped by other objects are perceived to continue behind the other
what is the law of pragnanz
aka principle of good figure, every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible - think the Olympic Rings
what is the law of similarity
similar things appear to be grouped together
where do gestalt laws come from?
- wertheimer - innate laws built into the system
- contra helmhooltz who thought it was all learning