Chapter 3

Lecture Outline

Visual Perception
 Chapter 3: Visual Perception

 Lecture Outline
 The Visual System
 Form Perception
 Constancy
 Depth Perception

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 The Visual System

 Perception seems easy and effortless

 But consider people with akinetopsia
 Unable to perceive motion
 See “nothing between” locations

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The Visual System

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 The Visual System

 Photoreceptors
Rods Cones
Lower sensitivity Higher sensitivity

Lower acuity Higher acuity

Color-blind Color-sensitive

Periphery of the retina In the fovea

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 The Visual System

Rods are mostly in the periphery and

cones are mostly in the center.

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 The Visual System

 A series of neurons communicates

information from the retina to the cortex.
 In the eye
 Photoreceptors
 Bipolar cells

 Ganglion cells and the optic nerve

 In the thalamus
 Lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN)
 In the cortex
 V1, the primary visual projection area, or primary
visual cortex, located in the occipital lobe

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 The Visual System

 Lateral inhibition
 Cells linking the retina and brain are already
performing computations.

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 The Visual System

 Cell C is more inhibited than cell B

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 The Visual System

What we see is not what we perceive

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Mach-Bands Illusion

11
 The Visual System

 Single-cell recording

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 Video

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMELP
-1D8Qk

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 The Visual System

Stimulus in center leads to faster firing rates

Stimulus in surrounding area leads to slower firing rates

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 The Visual System
No Stimulus
stimulus

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 The Visual System

 Different neurons in area V1 are

specialized, resulting in parallel
processing rather than serial
processing.

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The Visual System

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The Visual System

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 The Visual System

 Parallel processing in the visual pathway

 Parvocellularcells
 Magnocellular cells

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 The Visual System

 The what system and where system projected

on the brain surface

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 The Visual System

 The what system

 Identification
of objects
 Occipital-temporal pathway
 Visual agnosia

 The where system

 Location of objects and guiding of our responses
 Occipital-parietal pathway
 Problems with reaching for seen objects

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 The Visual System

Parallel processing splits up the problem

But we do not see the world as disjointed

Binding problem

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 The Visual System

 Elements that help solve the binding

problem
 Spatialposition
 Neural synchrony

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 The Visual System

 Attention is critical for binding visual features.

 When attention is overloaded, people will make
conjunction errors.
 People with attention deficits due to parietal
cortex damage are particularly impaired at judging
features combining into objects.
 Neuronal firing becomes synchronized for
attended stimuli, but not for unattended stimuli.

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 Form Perception

Simple Visual Features

Object Recognition
Jerome Bruner
Gestalt Psychology

Knowledge

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 Form Perception

One set of visual features

Two possible interpretations

But only one can be seen at a time

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 Form Perception

 Knowledge can change

our interpretation.
 Some figures are neutral
with regard to
figure/ground
organization.

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 Form Perception

 People resolve ambiguity in everyday

situations.

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 Form Perception

 Your ability to interpret these scenes is

governed by a few basic principles.

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 Form Perception

 How our mind creates objects

Single objects

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 Form Perception

Parallel Processing
Simple Visual Features

Object Recognition

Knowledge

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 Form Perception

It is simpler to interpret
this shape as one X than
as two V’s.

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 Form Perception

 What is this?
 Hint: The black is the background.

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 Form Perception

Proximity, good continuation, closure

Letter and word recognition

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 Form Perception

Brain areas for basic visual features Brain areas for large-scale form

Interactive

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 Constancy

 The sensory information we receive changes

but object properties appear as constant.
 Perceptual constancy
 Sizeconstancy
 Shape constancy
 Brightness constancy

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Constancy

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 Constancy

 Unconscious inference
 Hermann von Helmholtz noted that as object
size doubles, image size decreases by half.

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 Constancy

 The role of interpretation becomes clear from

misinterpretations—illusions.

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 Constancy

 Lateral inhibition produces a contrast effect.

 The shadow amplifies the effect.

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 Depth Perception

 We need to know distance to be

successful at size, shape, and
brightness judgments.
 Binocular disparity
 Each eye receives
different stimuli.

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 Depth Perception

 Monocular distance cues

 Each eye’s muscles adjust
 Pictorial cues
 Interposition

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 Depth Perception

 Monocular distance cues

 Linearperspective
 Texture gradients

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 Depth Perception

 Depth through motion

 Motion parallax
 Optic flow

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 MOTION PARALLAX

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgfhNz
KPEM4

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 Optic Flow

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysGM3
CfBVpU

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 Depth Perception

 Multiple cues provide information across very

different circumstances.
 There is some redundancy but also flexibility.

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Chapter 3 Questions

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1. Which of the following is supportive of the claim that
perception is in the “eye of the beholder” and not in the
stimulus itself?
a) When presented with ambiguous letters, the visual
system uses context to determine their identity.
b) A traffic light can be identified even if partially
occluded by a tree branch.
c) Whether someone remembers having seen an
ambiguous figure (e.g., the face-vase) before depends
on whether the interpretation of the figure is the same.
d) all of the above

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2. Which of the following is evidence for a feature theory of
perception?
a) The visual system is specialized, with cells that detect
single features.
b) When researchers are able to stabilize the retinal image
for an individual, preventing tiny eye movements
(saccades) that refresh the rods and cones, the image
stays the same.
c) In visual search paradigms, in which a single target must
be found in an array of other items, target identification is
faster when it shares features with the distractors.
d) Detecting an embedded figure (including its features) is
independent of the way the form is parsed.

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