Perception is an active and constructive process
We used quick and dirty estimate of the world
This can lead to misinterpretations of the world
Visual illusions
Change Detection
A compelling change detection study demonstrates that our experience of a picture-like
visual world may be an illusion. – when you look at the same picture with a slight
difference for a few milliseconds, you do not necessarily see the change.
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Change blindness
- the failure to consciously detect an obvious change in a scene.
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Grand illusion of perception
-the illusion that what we see in our visual field is a clear
and detailed picture of the world
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contrary to our subjective experience, we likely process only one or two objects in
detail at any given moment.
Feature Integration Theory
What we perceive is not a faithful and detailed view of the world but an assortment of
mostly disconnected features.
Feature integration theory (FIT):
when we initially view objects in our field of vision we
unconsciously extract their features (color, orientation) across the whole scene being
viewed through a process called
preattentive processing
(the unconscious extraction of
features that must take place before we can perceive an object).
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FIT assumes that for an object to be consciously perceived as a whole object, its
features must be ‘’bound’’ together.
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This
feature binding
takes place when attention is applied to the features in a given
region of the visual field.

The Constraints of the Visual SystemA high-fidelity percept of the world is not possible because:


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- Winter '08
- LEVITIN