CHAPTER 5 - Perceiving Objects and Scenes

Question 1

What are some of the problems that make object perception difficult for computer but not for humans?

Question 2

What is structuralism, and why did the Gestalt psychologists propose an alternative to this way of explaining perception?

Question 3

How did the Gestalt psychologists explain perceptual organization?

Question 4

How did the Gestalt psychologists describe figure-ground segregation? What are some basic properties of figure and ground?

Question 5

What properties of a stimulus tend to favour perceiving an area as “figure”? Be sure you understand Vecera’s experiment that showed that the lower region of a display tends to be perceived as figure, and why Peterson and Salvagio stated that to understand how segregation occurs we have to consider what is happening in the wider scene

Question 6

Describe the Gestalt ideas about the role of meaning and past experience in determining figure-ground segregation

Question 7

Describe Gibson and Peterson’s experiment that showed that meaning can play a role in figure-ground segregation

Question 8

What is the recognition by components theory? How does it account for viewpoint invariance?

Question 9

What is the evidence that we can perceive the gist of a scene very rapidly? What information helps us identify the gist?

Question 10

What are regularities in the environment? Give examples of physical regularities, and discuss how these regularities are related to the Gestalt laws of organization

Question 11

What are semantic regularities? How do semantic regularities affect our perception of objects within scenes? What is the relation between semantic regularities and the scene schema?

Question 12

Describe Helmholtz’s theory of unconscious inference. What does this have to say about inference and perception?

Question 13

Describe Bayesian inference. Be sure you understand the “sickness” example and how Bayesian inference can be applied to object perception

Question 14

What is predictive coding? Describe an example of how the brain might use prediction to perceive a real-world situation

Question 15

What is the role of the lateral occipital complex in perception?

Question 16

Describe the evidence suggesting that the FFA is involved in perceiving faces. Be sure your answer includes a description of prosopagnosia

Question 17

Discuss how other (non-face) categories of objects are represented in the brain, including the fMRI study by Huth and coworkers. What does this say about modular versus distributed representation?

Question 18

What is the role of the PPA/PHC in scene perception? Describe the function of the PPA/PHC according to the spatial layout hypothesis. What are some other proposed functions of this area?

Question 19

Describe Tong’s experiment in which he presented a picture of a house to one eye and a picture of a face to the other eye. What did the results indicate?

Question 20

What is the multivoxel pattern analysis? Describe how “decoders” have enabled researchers to use the brain’s response, measured using fMRI, to predict what a person is seeing

Question 21

Describe two experiments showing that neural mind reading is possible. What are some limitations of these experiments?

Question 22

Why do some researchers believe that faces are “special”? What do the eye movement experiments and the face inversion experiments show?

Question 23

What are some areas in addition to the fusiform face area that are involved in perceiving faces?

Question 24

What is the expertise hypothesis? Describe the fMRI evidence supporting this idea. Describe the experiment which studied faces by measuring functional connectvitiy

Question 25

What is the evidence that newborns and young infants can perceive faces? What is the evidence that perceiving the full complexity of faces does not occur until late adolescence or adulthood?