As humans with complex categorical tendencies and visual-attentional systems, we assume that our visual representations of the world around us are accurate. Previous research provides an explanation of how what we see is a watered-down version of the world around us, and specifically, how the phenomenon of change blindness assists that. Change blindness describes the experience of not noticing objects that are in our visual field, particularly due to an allocation of attention on the part of the individual. It has been found in past studies that whether a stimulus is in the center of the visual field or in the periphery makes a difference in how change blindness is experienced, in that centrally located changes have been found to be more apparent than changes in the peripheral area. Our study tests change blindness in college aged participants exposed to alternating images, in measuring their accuracy in describing what the change in addition to the speed with which the change is noticed. The testing variables include the type of change (location change, color and presence) and the location that these changes take place (central versus peripheral). We predicted that changes in color would be most accurately and quickly identified, and that object change taking place centrally would also be noticed quicker and with more accuracy. Consenting participants were shown an alternation of an image and its modified version (interposed by a black screen) producing a flickering effect. Subjects observed this until they indicated change recognition. Speed and accuracy were compared and measured for all variables. We found that a change in color was the most reliably and quickly reported, followed by changes in presence and changes in location...
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...erent factors may affect how, when, and to what extent change blindness occurs. In doing so, we are interested in the reaction times and accuracy of subjects in identifying a difference between an original and altered image. Other implications that we aim to replicate are the effects of the type of change including: how the changed object in question is positioned (centrally or peripherally), as well as which types of specific differences lend themselves to be better noticed or ignored (changing the color of an object, and the presence or absence of an object). We hypothesize that there will be a significant effect displayed in correspondence to color changes, in both accuracy and speed. Also, we hypothesize that changes made to the color or mere presence of an object will be significantly more noticeable when centrally viewed, as opposed to those in the periphery.
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
Another speaker, Margaret Livingstone delves into the visual aspect of our senses. Livingstone mentions how artists recognize things about vision that neuroscientists are not privy to until years later. Livingstone discussed the differentiation between color and lightness, and how the two contribute differently to a work of art. Color is thought of as “comparing activity” whereas light is thought of as “summing them.” Livingstone indicates that the visual system is subdivided into a ventral system and a dorsal system. The ventral system is responsible for object recognition, face recognition, and color. The dorsal system is responsible for navigating through the environment, special organization, and emotional recognition. The ability for humans to see distance and depth is carried via our colorblind part of our visual system. As a result, Livingstone concludes that one cannot see depth and shading unless the luminance is right to convey three-dimensional.
From one end, what we see right away tends to be the natural obvious. We notice these things right away because they are in plain sight and we are used to seeing them every day without thinking or analyzing what we perceive. For example, the grass is green and the sky is blue. Dillard speaks of a time where she saw a frog and because of the surroundings it was in and its appearance it was hard for her to recognize it for what it was. Dillard described, “I once spent a full three minutes looking at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions… When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what pain...
One wonders what takes place in the brain to cause such phenomenal differences in perception. The cause is unknown for certain, like many things in the realm of science it has not been researched nearly enough, but there are some indications.
Processing capacity is a very broad and flexible category according to many researchers. In fact, the quote above mentioned suggests that we often fail to notice things that happen just in front of us (unexpected events that are often salient) either because we were completely absorbed by something else or because we had so many things to do at the same time that we couldn’t pay attention to it. We have all at least once failed to see a friend who was waving at us while eating in the cafeteria or walking in a crowded street. The primary question that we should ask ourselves is: how many things can we attend at the same time? The truth is that we didn’t perceive this friend because of a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”. The problem is that the richness of our visual experience leads us to believe that our visual representation will include and preserve the same amount of detail (Levin et al 2000). In this paper we’ll see the different theories of inattentional blindness, and the classical theories demonstrating this paradigm.
As a person one might find that we follow a specific routine on the day to day basis. Sudden changes to these routines feels weird and out of place. In William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” based in a fictional town called Jefferson taking place during the twentieth century. The time period is indeed an important factor because southern tradition was above all of the highest importance. This short story gives the audience details of life during that time in which they followed the values of southern tradition and the importance to never stray away from those traditions. The context of the story is laced with subliminal messages of humanities resistance to change.
Our attention is very selective when it comes to getting information from our environment. We could be looking at everything within our environment and miss changes that occur while looking. According to Rensink, O’Regan and Clark (1997), attention is a key factor, meaning when our attention is focused on the area of change then change can be detected. When we fail to detect change, it can result in change blindness. In support of this idea, Simons and Levin (1998) suggest that change blindness occurs if there is a lack of “precise” visual representation of their surroundings. In other words, a person can be looking at an object and not fully notice a change.
In the article "Features and Objects in Visual Processing," Anne Treisman states that there are two theoretical levels of visual processing. In the first level of visual processing, certain components of visual information are processed instantly and unconsciously. A person does not have to concentrate on individual parts of the scene. This stage of processing is called the preattentive stage. During the preattentive stage, the light received by the visual receptors is translated in to the lines, curves, colors and textures of the objects. Within the brain, there are two distinct visual areas that specialize in different areas of processing. The first area processes lines, curves, color, and texture and other areas deal with movement. After this initial processing occurs, another area of the brain processes the more complex and distinct qualities of a scene. Then, all of the components of the objects in the scene are recombined into whole objects. In order to support the preattentive stage of visual processing, Treisman devises that parts of objects that belong to the same object share similar attributes. Attributes such as color, continuity of lines and curves that define the boundaries between objects. She uses an experiment to determine which properties of a visual stimulus make its boundaries stand out from other similar objects. The properties of an object that make it stand out are used by the visual processing system in distinguishing the object from ground. In actuality, boundaries are conspicuous between components that are distinctive in basic properties such as color, brightness and line orientation but not in the way their properties are connected or grouped. In an experiment showing evidence of this principle, subjects are shown a picture in which a region of T’s easily distinguishes itself from an area of slanted T’s but not from a region of backwards L’s that are constructed of the same geons as the T’s. This illustrates that line orientations are important features in the preattentive stage of visual processing and that the specific configurations or conjunctions of lines are not.
The Visual Information Analysis (Todd 1999) incorporates areas related to the cognitive skills used for receiving and organizing visual information from the surrounding environment. The visual information
Broadbent’s (1958) filter theory of attention proposes that there is a filter device between sensory identification and short-term memory. This filter is used as a buffer that allows an individual to manage several different forms of simultaneous stimuli where one stimulus is processed in the filter whilst the second stimulus is kept in the buffer to be processed at a later time (Broadbent, 1958). The extent to which this theory of attention can provide an effective explanation of how we attend to objects is questionable due to the fact that Broadbent’s filter theory is designed to explain auditory attention as opposed to visual attention. In this sense, Broadbent’s filter theory cannot explain how we attend to objects and thus provides no useful information for such attention. An object was making a sound co...
However, categorical perception and its effects are not limited to auditory stimuli. As mentioned earlier, a categorical perception effect can also be seen in different kinds of visual stimuli.The perception of colors in a rainbow may be the most obvious example of CP. Even though a rainbow consists of many different wavelengths of visible light, observers only perceive distinct colors and not the full continuum of existing visible light (Goldstone, 2009). In addition to applying to relatively simple stimuli such as colors, categorical perception can also partially explain expertise in certain subject areas. Radiologists, for instance, are particularly skilled at spotting differences between X-Ray images. These experts have developed an ability to spot meaningful (cross-category)differences while minimizing irrelevant (within-category) ones (Goldstone, 1994). Categorical perception has also been demonstrated in facial expressions and basic shapes (Beale and Keil,
There are many different Visual Perception principles in perception. The main principles are Gestalt. Gestalt is a German word meaning 'form' or 'shape'. Gestalt psychologists formulated a series of principles that describe how t...
Visual Discrimination is “using the sense of sight to notice and compare the features of different items to distinguish one item from another” (NCLD Editorial Team, 2014) http://www.ncld.o...
Each one of us lives in our own unique world of perception. As individuals, we may experience life in an entirely different way through our senses and life experiences. Therefore, perception can be tricky since it is very personal to each one of us. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, perception has three meanings; (1) “the way you think about or understand someone or something,” (2) “the ability to understand or notice something easily,” and, (3) “the way that you notice or understand something using one of your senses” (2014, para. 1). C.S. Lewis said, “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are” (n.d., para. 11). In other words,
Mental spatial perception has its own structure i.e. metric characteristics. It turned out that the physical characteristics of objects (colour and shape) have a pronounced effect on performance tracking of moving objects, but spatial-temporal (location and direction of travel) (Čičević and Trifunovic, 2013). In his research Moyer (Moyer, 1973) showed that the ratio of the size of the visual performance is determined by relations in reality. Also, the Kosslyn started from the assumption that the manipulation of visual performances take place in a manner that allows the preservation of characteristics that are analogue to the characteristics of real objects they represent (Kosslyn, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1994). From this it would follow that the exploration of visual representations is analogue to observation.