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Psychological Perception

Table of Contents

Gestalt Principles & The Perception of Groups

  • Characterizing Meaning within Gestalt Principles
    • Figure Ground: elements will be percieved as either figures or ground (the background where figures are)
    • Simplicity (Law of Pragnanz): we will percieve things in a way that makes it simpler for us to understand
    • Proximity, things that are close together are percieved as related than things that are spaced far apart
    • Similarity, things that are similar are likely to be related and grouped together
    • Good continuation, elemnts arranged on a continuous line or curve are percieved to be more related than elements not on the line or curve
    • Closure: incomplete objects will tend to be perceived as wholes

Recognizing Visual Objects

  1. Represent the Physical Stimulus in STM (Short Term Memory)
  2. Find a representation in LTM (Long Term Memory) that matches the current one

Template Theory

  • Template Theory: We have mental templates in our mind for every object that we know and recognize.
    • We recognize something by comparing the correlation of similartiy to the template that is stored in the LTM
    • The issue with this theory is that there are never any perfect match and the database of templates is very large
  • Templates + Transformations: Before matching the templates, there are transformations that take place to sort of normalize the data before matching
  • GEONS: geometric elements of which all objects are matched to
    • We put geons together to make objects

Recognition by Components Theory

RBC

  • Basic properties of GEONS
    • They have to be easily discriminated
    • View invariant (looks identical from most viewpoints)
    • Robust to noise
  • Difficulties of Geons:
    • Deriving structural representations and geons can be difficult
    • Contextual evidence is omitted, which is a vital part of understanding things

Top Down Processing

  • Perception is not automatic and there is a lot of extraneous factors that need to be considered to identify objects
  • Top Down Processing occurs involving making inferences based on past experiences or surrounding experiences
    • This processing is also represented in the brain as follows
  • Word Superiority Effect: people are better at recognizing whether a letter was present when they are given a word rather than a non-word
    • this is due to the presence of bigram detectors, which is when we detect pairs of letters together
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