Chapter 4: Perceiving and Recognizing Objects

Question 1

Extrastriate Cortex

Answer 1

The region of cortex bordering the primary visual cortex and containing multiple areas involved in visual processing

Question 2

Lession

Answer 2

A region of damaged brain, to destroy brain region.

Question 3

Agnosia

Answer 3

A failure to recognize objects in spite of the ability to see them. Agnosia is typically due to brain damage.

Question 4

Inferotemporal (IT) cortex

Answer 4

Part of cortex in lower portion of the temporal lobe, important in object recognition

Question 5

Homologous regions

Answer 5

Brain regions that appear to have the same function in different species.

Question 6

feed-forward process

Answer 6

a process that carries out a computation one neural step after another, without need for feed-back from a later stage to an earlier stage.

Question 7

middle vision

Answer 7

a loosley defined stage of visual processing that comes after basic features have been extracted from the image and before object recognition and scene understanding.

Question 8

Illusory contour

Answer 8

A contour that is perceived even though nothing changes from one side of it to the other in an image.

Question 9

Structuralism

Answer 9

a school of thought believing that complex objects or perceptions could be understood by analysis of the components.

Question 10

Gestalt

Answer 10

Perceptual whole could be greater than apparent sum of parts

Question 11

Gestalt grouping rules

Answer 11

A set of rules describing which elements in an image will appear to group together. The original list was assembles by members of the Gestalt school of thought.

Question 12

Good Continuation

Answer 12

A Gestalt grouping rule stating that two elements will tend to group together if they seem to lie on the same contour.

Question 13

texture segmentation

Answer 13

carving an image into regions of common texture properties

Question 14

similarity

Answer 14

Gestalt rule: tendency of two feature to group together will increase as similarity between them increases

Question 15

proximity

Answer 15

tendency to group together increases with shortened distance

Question 16

Parallelsim

Answer 16

a rule for figure-ground assignment stating that parallel contours are likely to belong t the same figure.

Question 17

symmetry

Answer 17

a rule for figure-ground assignment stating that symmetrical regions are more likely to be seen as figure.

Question 18

Ambiguous figure

Answer 18

a visual stimulus that gives rise to two or more interpretations of its identity or structure.

Question 19

Necker cube

Answer 19

an outline that is perceptually bi-stable. Unlike the situation with most stimuli, two interpretations continually battle for perceptual dominance.

Question 20

accidental viewpoint

Answer 20

A viewing position that produces some regularity in the visual image that is not present in the world

Question 21

figure-ground assignment

Answer 21

The process of determining that some regions of an image belong to a foreground object (figure) and other regions are part of the background (ground).

Question 22

Surroundedness

Answer 22

A rule for figure-ground assignment stating that if one region is entirely surrounded by another, it is likely that the surrounded region is the figure.

Question 23

reliability

Answer 23

The degree to which two line segments appear to be part of the same contour.

Question 24

heuristic

Answer 24

a mental shortcut

Question 25

nonaccidental figure

Answer 25

A feature of an object that is not dependent on the exact (or accidental) viewing position of the observer.

Question 26

global superiority effect

Answer 26

The finding in various experiments that the properties of the whole objects take precedence over the properties of the parts of the object.

Question 27

Bayesian Approach

Answer 27

A way of formalizing the idea that our perception is a combination of the current stimulus and our knowledge about the conditions of the world - what is and is not likely to occur. The Bayesian approach is states mathematically as Bayes’ Theorem - P(A|O) = P(A) X P(O|A)/P(O) - which enables us to calculate the probability (P) that the world is in a particular state (A) given a particular observation (O).

Question 28

parahippocampal place area (PPA)

Answer 28

A regions of extrastriate visual cortex in humans that is specifically reliably activated more by images of places than by other stimuli.

Question 29

fusiform face area (FFA)

Answer 29

A regions of extrastriate visual cortex in humans that is specifically and reliably activated by human faces.

Question 30

middle temporal area (MT)

Answer 30

an area of the brain thought to be important in the perception of motion.

Question 31

Naive template theory

Answer 31

The proposal that the visual system recognizes objects by matching the neural representation of the image with a stored representation of the same “shape” in the brain.

Question 32

extrastriate body area (EBA)

Answer 32

A regions of extrastriate visual cortex in humans that is specifically and reliably activated by images of the body other than the face.

Question 33

Structural description

Answer 33

A description of an object in terms of the nature of its constituent parts and the relationships between those parts.

Question 34

geon

Answer 34

In Beiderman’s recognition-by-components model, any of the “geometric ions” out of which perceptual objects are built.

Question 35

recognition-by-components model

Answer 35

Biederman’s model of object recognition by the identities and relationships of their component parts.

Question 36

viewpoint invariance

Answer 36

1. A property of an object that does not change when observer viewpoint changes. 2. A class of theories of object recognition that proposes representations of objects that do not change when viewpoint changes.

Question 37

entry-level category

Answer 37

For an object, label that comes to mind most quickly when we identify it. At the subordinate level, the object might be more specifically named or more generally named.

Question 38

Porsopagnosia

Answer 38

An inability to recognize faces.

Question 39

Double dissociation

Answer 39

The phenomenon in which on of two functions, such as hearing and sight, can be damaged without harm to the other and vice versa.

Question 40

Congenital prosopagnosia

Answer 40

A form of “face blindness” apparently present from birth, as opposed to “acquired prosopagnosia”, which would typically be the result of an injury to the nervous system.