Chapter 2: Perception Flashcards
What are the two most important human perceptual systems?
Auditory & Visual Perception
What % of our brain is devoted to visual processing?
50%
What are the two visual pathways?
“What” Visual pathway & “Where” visual pathway.
Visual Agnosia
An inability to recognize visual objects that results from damage to certain brain regions. (not blind)
Apperceptive Agnosia
A form of visual agnosia marked by the inability to recognize simple shapes such as circles and triangles.
Generally believed to have problems with early processing of information in the visual system.
Associative Agnosia
A form of visual agnosia marked by the inability to recognize complex objects, but with retention of the ability to recognize simple shapes and to copy drawings of complex objects.
Difficulty with pattern recognition, which happens later on in the visual system.
Visual Perception can be divided into an ___ phase, in which shapes and objects are extracted from the visual scene, and a ___ phase, in which the shapes and objects are recognized.
Early ; Later
Retina
The innermost layer of cells within the eye; it includes the photoreceptor cells, bi-polar cells, and ganglion cells.
What are the two types of photoreceptor cells
Cones & Rods
Cones
Involved in colour vision and high-acuity vision (high resolution).
Rods
Principally responsible for the less acute, black-and-white vision we experience at night. Less light needed to trigger a response.
Fovea
The area of the retina with the greatest concentration of cones and therefore the greatest visual acuity. When we focus on an object, we move our eyes so that the image of the object falls on the fovea.
Periphery vision
Detects global information (Ex., movement).
P cells -> B cells -> G cells (where do their axons lead?)
Photoreceptor cells - Bipolar Cells - Ganglion Cells.
The axons of the ganglion cells leave the eye and form the optic nerve!
How many ganglion cell axons form the optic nerve in each eye?
800,000.
Receptive Field
In vision, the region of the retina from which a cell in the visual system encodes information.
Primary visual Cortex
The first cortical area to receive visual input, organized according to a topographic representation of the visual field.
Primary visual Cortex
The first cortical area to receive visual input, organized according to a topographic representation of the visual field.
There is a double reversal in the visual field
The information presented to the left visual field gets processed in the right hemisphere and vise versa.
The image also gets flipped vertically. Information processed in the upper half of the visual field gets processed in the bottom portion of the primary visual cortex.
“What” visual pathway
A neural pathway carrying visual information from the primary visual cortex to regions of the temporal lobe that are specialized for identifying objects.
“Where” visual pathway
A neural pathway carrying visual information from the primary visual cortex to regions of the parietal lobe that are specialized for representing spatial information and for coordinating vision with action.
What happens when the “what” visual pathway is cut?
Difficulty learning to identify objects.
What happens when the “where” visual pathway is cut?
Difficulty learning to identify specific locations.
Kuffler (1953)
Shows how information is encoded by the ganglion cells in the retina and cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus.
Describe an “on-off” cell.
if light falls on a small region of the retina at the center of the cell’s receptive field, their spontaneous rates of firing will increase. If light falls in the region just around this sensitive center, however, the spontaneous rate of firing will decrease. Light farther from the center elicits no change in the spontaneous firing rate — neither an increase nor a decrease.
Describe an “off-on” cell
Light at the center decreases the spontaneous rate of firing, and light in the surrounding areas increases that rate.
Hubel & Wiesel (1962)
Studied the primary visual field of cats.
Found four patterns in the cortical cells.
Describe cortical cells
Their receptive fields are elongated in shape (contrasted with the circular shape of the on-off/off-on cells.
Edge Detectors
Cells in the visual cortex that respond most to edges in the visual field. Split vertically.
Respond positively to light on one side of the line; negatively to light on the other side of the line.
Bar Detectors
Cells in the visual cortex that respond most to bard in the visual field. Split vertically in three parts.
Bar detectors with a positive center will respond most if the bar of light just covers its center. (positive in middle, negative on edges). This also works in reverse.
Bar & Edge Detector cells are specific with respect to: __, __, & __.
Position, Orientation, and Width.
Hubel & Wiesel (1977)
Visual cortex is divided into 2x2mm regions (called hypercolumns)
Explain how hypercolumns work
NEED HELP!
Other than line orientation, size, and width, what other information does the visual system extract from the visual signal?
Colours of objects and whether they are moving.
Livingstone & Hubel (1988)
Form, colour, and movement are processed separately.
How many visual areas are there?
32.
Feature Map
A representation of the spatial locations of a particular visual feature.
There are separate maps for colour, orientation, and movement. (Ex. Moving red vertical bar: separate feature maps represent its colour as red, its orientation as vertical, and its movement as occurring in that location).
What patterns do cells in the inferior temporal cortex respond to?
Complex patterns (like hands and faces).
What is a fundamental problem in the visual field?
Information is laid out on the retina is a 2-D image and it needs to be constructed into a 3-D image.
What cues does the visual system use to infer distance?
texture gradient, stereopsis, and motion parallax.
(other important cues involve features such as: size, position, and lighting).
Texture gradient
Items that we assume are equal in size and evenly spaced appear to regularly decrease in size and pack more closely together the further you move away.
Ex., Standing on a balcony and looking over a crowd (The Pope example).
Stereopsis
Ability to perceive 3D depth based on the fact that each eye receives a slightly different view of the world.
Ex. 3-D glasses: turning two 2D images into a 3D image.
Motion parallax
Provides information about 3D structure when the observer and / or the objects in a scene are in motion.
Ex: The image of distant objects will move across the observer’s retina more slowly than the images of closer objects.
David Marr (1982): proposed what?
2 1/2 D sketch
2 1/2 D sketch
As proposed by David Marr, a visual representation that identifies where various visual features are located in space relative to the viewer.