Study Questions: Recognition




1.  Define "perception".

2.  Briefly describe the gestalt principles of "grouping of features". How would you demonstrate the relative importance of these principles?

3.  Describe the Gestalt principles of "good form". How are these principles used to explain the perception of complex scenes containing multiple objects?

4.  Describe several things the Gestalt laws suggest that you should do if you were interested in the problem of making ink drawings with very effective camouflage of a given fixed portion of the drawing?

5.  What are "ambiguous figures", "reversible figures" and "impossible figures"?

6.  What is an "illusory contour"?  Draw an example.  Where in the brain does one begin to see responses to illusory as well as real contours?

7.  Describe a visual search experiment. How do the results turn out for an easy search task as a function of the number of distractors? How do the results change if the task is a difficult (serial) search task? How do the reaction times for "no" answers differ from those for "yes" answers? Why?

8.  What is an "agnosia"?  Describe different forms of agnosias and their possible relationship to specific processing areas in the brain for recognizing different categories of stimuli.

9.  Briefly contrast viewpoint-dependent and viewpoint-independent models of recognition. Is there any physiological evidence that relates to this distinction?