Chapter 2 Flashcards
One of two types of photoreceptors in the eye; functions at low light levels, poor resolution, black and white, most concentrated in the periphery of the visual field
Rods
One of two types of photoreceptors in the eye; functions best at light levels, high resolution, color, most concentrated in the center of the visual field (fovea).
Cones
Neurons leading from the eye to the superior colliculus and the lateral geniculate nucleus; axons make up the optic nerve.
Ganglion Cells
The area of the visual field to which a given cell (e.g., in the optic nerve or visual cortex) responds; stimulating some parts of this area may cause an inhibitory response while stimulating other parts may cause an excitatory response.
Receptive Fields
Located in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex; contains many modules, each of which codes a variety of information (depth, orientation, color, etc.) about a specific location on the visual field.
Primary Visual Cortex
Refers to the topographic organization of the primary visual cortex, in which adjacent areas of the cortex respond to adjacent locations of the visual field.
Retinotopic Organization
Processes a specific type of information (e.g., shape, movement, color) over the entire visual field.
Secondary Visual Cortex
A theory of pattern recognition that claims that people recognize objects by first extracting their simple or basic properties (edges, corners, etc.) and relationships among these properties.
Feature Analysis
Short for “recognition-by-components”; a theory of visual pattern recognition that assumes that objects are analyzed and represented in terms of simple 3D geometrical shapes.
RBC Theory
3D geometrical forms such as cones, cylinders, spheres, and so on; a small vocabulary of such forms could be used to represent the shapes of many familiar objects.
Geons
Views at which objects are most easily recognized, typically those which reveal the most information about an object’s features or component shapes.
canonical perspective
Context-, expectation-, or theory-based processing, e.g., using knowledge of the context in which a stimulus occurs to help recognize it.
top-down
Data-driven processing, e.g., recognizing a stimulus based only on the physical information it contains.
bottom-up
Better visual recognition of letters when they are presented in a word context, compared to when a single letter is presented alone.
word superiority effect
A connectionist model of visual pattern recognition that features both excitatory and inhibitory connections, and in which activation can flow from the top down (word level to letter level) as well as from the bottom up (features to letters, letters to words).
interactive activation model
