Seeing and thinking
TL;DR: The author presents some examples from the area of amodal completion which, according to him, hardly support a ratiomorphic theory, but constitute counterexamples that rather support the hypothesis that seeing and thinking function according to different rules.
About: This article is published in Acta Psychologica.The article was published on 1985-05-01. It has received 149 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Poison control.
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TL;DR: The paper discusses arguments from computer vision and psychology showing that vision is "intelligent" and involves elements of "problem solving" and examines a number of examples where instructions and "hints" are alleged to affect what is seen.
Abstract: Although the study of visual perception has made more progress in the past 40 years than any other area of cognitive science, there remain major disagreements as to how closely vision is tied to cognition. This target article sets out some of the arguments for both sides (arguments from computer vision, neuroscience, psychophysics, perceptual learning, and other areas of vision science) and defends the position that an important part of visual perception, corresponding to what some people have called early vision, is prohibited from accessing relevant expectations, knowledge, and utilities in determining the function it computes - in other words, it is cognitively im- penetrable. That part of vision is complex and involves top-down interactions that are internal to the early vision system. Its function is to provide a structured representation of the 3-D surfaces of objects sufficient to serve as an index into memory, with somewhat differ- ent outputs being made available to other systems such as those dealing with motor control. The paper also addresses certain concep- tual and methodological issues raised by this claim, such as whether signal detection theory and event-related potentials can be used to assess cognitive penetration of vision. A distinction is made among several stages in visual processing, including, in addition to the inflexible early-vision stage, a pre-per- ceptual attention-allocation stage and a post-perceptual evaluation, selection, and inference stage, which accesses long-term memory. These two stages provide the primary ways in which cognition can affect the outcome of visual perception. The paper discusses argu- ments from computer vision and psychology showing that vision is "intelligent" and involves elements of "problem solving." The cases of apparently intelligent interpretation sometimes cited in support of this claim do not show cognitive penetration; rather, they show that certain natural constraints on interpretation, concerned primarily with optical and geometrical properties of the world, have been com- piled into the visual system. The paper also examines a number of examples where instructions and "hints" are alleged to affect what is seen. In each case it is concluded that the evidence is more readily assimilated to the view that when cognitive effects are found, they have a locus outside early vision, in such processes as the allocation of focal attention and the identification of the stimulus.
907 citations
Cites background or methods from "Seeing and thinking"
...This is also the argument advanced by Kanizsa (1985) and explicitly endorsed by Rock (1983, p. 338)....
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...…in demonstrations of what Rock (1983) has called “problemsolving,” wherein vision provides what appear to be intelligent interpretations of certain systematically ambiguous displays (but see Kanizsa 1985, for a different view concerning the use of what he calls a “ratiomorphic” vocabulary)....
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...As Kanizsa (1985) and Kanizsa and Gerbino (1982) have persuasively argued, these principles do not appear to reflect a tendency for the simplest description of the world and they are insensitive to knowledge, expectations, and even to the effects of learning (Kanizsa 1969)....
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TL;DR: This work suggests that none of these hundreds of studies – either individually or collectively – provides compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or “cognitive penetrability,” and suggests that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls.
Abstract: What determines what we see? In contrast to the traditional "modular" understanding of perception, according to which visual processing is encapsulated from higher-level cognition, a tidal wave of recent research alleges that states such as beliefs, desires, emotions, motivations, intentions, and linguistic representations exert direct top-down influences on what we see. There is a growing consensus that such effects are ubiquitous, and that the distinction between perception and cognition may itself be unsustainable. We argue otherwise: none of these hundreds of studies - either individually or collectively - provide compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or "cognitive penetrability". In particular, and despite their variety, we suggest that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls. And whereas abstract theoretical challenges have failed to resolve this debate in the past, our presentation of these pitfalls is empirically anchored: in each case, we show not only how certain studies could be susceptible to the pitfall (in principle), but how several alleged top-down effects actually are explained by the pitfall (in practice). Moreover, these pitfalls are perfectly general, with each applying to dozens of other top-down effects. We conclude by extracting the lessons provided by these pitfalls into a checklist that future work could use to convincingly demonstrate top-down effects on visual perception. The discovery of substantive top-down effects of cognition on perception would revolutionize our understanding of how the mind is organized; but without addressing these pitfalls, no such empirical report will license such exciting conclusions. Language: en
707 citations
Cites background from "Seeing and thinking"
...(For further discussion of why vision being “smart” in such ways does not imply cognitive penetrability, see Kanizsa, 1985; Pylyshyn, 1999.)...
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01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: This paper presents a meta-modelling framework for concept-ground organization and discusses its applications in the contexts of sport, sport and other domains.
Abstract: SECTION ONE: GENERAL BACKGROUND SECTION TWO: GROUPS, PATTERNS, TEXTURES SECTION THREE: CONTOURS AND SHAPES SECTION FOUR: FIGURE-GROUND ORGANIZATION SECTION FIVE: SURFACE AND COLOUR PERCEPTION SECTION SIX: MOTION AND EVENT PERCEPTION SECTION SEVEN: PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION AND OTHER MODALITIES SECTION EIGHT: SPECIAL INTEREST TOPICS SECTION NINE: APPLICATIONS OF PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION SECTION TEN: THEORETICAL APPROACHES
194 citations
TL;DR: This model is used to simulate illusory contours and surface brightness induced by Ehrenstein disks, Kanizsa squares, Glass patterns, and café wall patterns in single contrast, reverse contrast, and mixed contrast configurations and illustrates how boundary and surface mechanisms can generate percepts that are highly context-sensitive.
Abstract: A neural network model is developed to explain how visual thalamocortical interactions give rise to boundary percepts such as illusory contours and surface percepts such as filled-in brightnesses. Top-down feedback interactions are needed in addition to bottom-up feed-forward interactions to simulate these data. One feedback loop is modeled between lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and cortical area V1, and another within cortical areas V1 and V2. The first feedback loop realizes a matching process which enhances LGN cell activities that are consistent with those of active cortical cells, and suppresses LGN activities that are not. This corticogeniculate feedback, being endstopped and oriented, also enhances LGN ON cell activations at the ends of thin dark lines, thereby leading to enhanced cortical brightness percepts when the lines group into closed illusory contours. The second feedback loop generates boundary representations, including illusory contours, that coherently bind distributed cortical features together. Brightness percepts form within the surface representations through a diffusive filling-in process that is contained by resistive gating signals from the boundary representations. The model is used to simulate illusory contours and surface brightnesses induced by Ehrenstein disks, Kanizsa squares, Glass patterns, and cafe wall patterns in single contrast, reverse contrast, and mixed contrast configurations. These examples illustrate how boundary and surface mechanisms can generate percepts that are highly context-sensitive, including how illusory contours can be amodally recognized without being seen, how model simple cells in V1 respond preferentially to luminance discontinuities using inputs from both LGN ON and OFF cells, how model bipole cells in V2 with two colinear receptive fields can help to complete curved illusory contours, how short-range simple cell groupings and long-range bipole cell groupings can sometimes generate different outcomes, and how model double-opponent, filling-in and boundary segmentation mechanisms in V4 interact to generate surface brightness percepts in which filling-in of enhanced brightness and darkness can occur before the net brightness distribution is computed by double-opponent interactions.
185 citations
TL;DR: The FACADE model as mentioned in this paper describes how geometrical and contrastive properties of a picture can either cooperate or compete when forming the boundaries and surface representation that subserve conscious percepts.
Abstract: This article develops the FACADE theory of 3-dimensional (3-D) vision and figure-ground separation to explain data concerning how 2-dimensional pictures give rise to 3-D percepts of occluding and occluded objects. The model describes how geometrical and contrastive properties of a picture can either cooperate or compete when forming the boundaries and surface representation that subserve conscious percepts. Spatially long-range cooperation and spatially short-range competition work together to separate the boundaries of occluding figures from their occluded neighbors. This boundary ownership process is sensitive to image T junctions at which occluded figures contact occluding figures. These boundaries control the filling-in of color within multiple depth-sensitive surface representations. Feedback between surface and boundary representations strengthens consistent boundaries while inhibiting inconsistent ones. Both the boundary and the surface representations of occluded objects may be amodally completed, while the surface representations of unoccluded objects become visible through modal completion. Functional roles for conscious modal and amodal representations in object recognition, spatial attention, and reaching behaviors are discussed. Model interactions are interpreted in terms of visual, temporal, and parietal cortices.
176 citations
References
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Book•
23 Aug 2011
TL;DR: The missing plates are on a CD held in the Pamphlet and ephemera filing cabinet under Catalogue number 2924 together with print-outs of the images.
Abstract: Dark brown calf leather cover, 240 x 160 mm, gold stamped on the front and back with the heraldic crest of Pembroke College, Oxford, and gold stamped with the book title on the spine, 874 pages and one page addendum A pocket formed by the back paste down contains five of originally eight folding plates There are pencil notes in English in a few margins The book is volume 9 in the series Allgemeine Encylopaedie der Physik edited by Gustav Karsten (see page facing the title page) Digital images of the missing plates are on a CD held in the Pamphlet and Ephemera filing cabinet under Catalogue number 2924 together with print-outs of the images They were copied courtesy of the BOA Museum Curator, Neil Handley, from a copy of this book in the Library of the the College of Optometrists, London Images of this missing plates are on the Museum iPhoto
2,068 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1983
TL;DR: The theory of visual perception that Irvin Rock develops and supports in this book with numerous original experiments, views perception as the outcome of a process of unconscious inference, problem solving, and the building of structural descriptions of the external world as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The theory of visual perception that Irvin Rock develops and supports in this book with numerous original experiments, views perception as the outcome of a process of unconscious inference, problem solving, and the building of structural descriptions of the external world. It is a radical departure from his earlier work and contrasts with traditional perceptual theories like those of James J. Gibson or the Gestalt view.Rock experiments with a series of phenomena, like motion perception, illusory contours, and size and brightness constancy, and shows that they can be understood in terms of the knowledge applied by the visual system to the interpretation of the retinal image. His work largely complements that being done in artificial intelligence, demonstrating that the visual system is far more subtle and intelligent in many tasks which have not yet been modelled on the computer.Irvin Rock, a noted investigator of perceptual phenomena for nearly three decades, is Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University.
939 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that the stratification in depth of different planes (chromatically homogeneous) may occur not according to past experience, logic and expectation, but according to a particularly strong perceptual factor studied by Petter.
26 citations
01 Dec 1970
TL;DR: In this paper, a Gestaltpsychologisch orientierten Forscher empfunden wird, wenn eine gewisse Erscheinung den Erwartungen nicht entspricht, die eine schematische Anwendung des Gestaltprinzips hervorrufen wurde.
Abstract: Der „Fehler des Gestaltpsychologen“ wird durch das Erstaunen enthullt, das von einem gestaltpsychologisch orientierten Forscher empfunden wird, wenn eine gewisse Erscheinung den Erwartungen nicht entspricht, die eine schematische Anwendung des Gestaltprinzips hervorrufen wurde. Einige Beispiele, in denen ein solcher Fehler in klarer Weise erscheint, werden angegeben und besprochen. Es werden noch einige Bemerkungen uber manche Bedingungen und Folgen der amodalen Erganzung hinzugefugt.
17 citations