: Perceiving Objects and Scenes Multiple Choice 1. Current computer programs are able to identify some objects _____. a. and require only brief “training” on a few images b. and are considered remarkably successful c. but they perform only slightly above chance d. but they often make errors that a human would never make ANSWER: d 2. The _____ problem shows that numerous physical stimuli can create exactly the same image on the retina. a. correspondence b. inverse projection c. occlusion d. ambiguity ANSWER: b 3. Jimmy looks at a moderately blurred picture of Princess Diana’s face. Jimmy will most likely _____. a. not be able to identify the face b. identify the face as male rather than female c. be able to correctly identify the face d. need a computer to scan the image to correctly identify it ANSWER: c 4. “Viewpoint invariance” means that _____. a. children can only represent one perceptual viewpoint at a time b. computers can invert images to easily perform object recognition c. humans can easily recognize objects when seen from different viewpoints d. monkeys can only recognize other monkey faces from a frontal view ANSWER: c 5. Wundt is to _____ as Wertheimer is to _____. a. structuralism; Gestalt psychology b. Gestalt psychology; structuralism c. functionalism; structuralism d. psychophysics; metaphysics ANSWER: a 6. Structuralists would be most likely to endorse which of the following statements? a. Sensations and perceptions are the same “unit” of thought. : Perceiving Objects and Scenes b. The whole of something is greater than its parts. c. The starting point for perceptions is the sensations that make them up. d. Past experience plays little or no role in perception formation. ANSWER: c 7. The demonstration of apparent movement provides support for the Gestalt approach because _____. a. the phenomenon cannot be explained by sensations alone b. the phenomenon relies exclusively on the perceiver’s past experience c. the images used do not follow the principle of common region d. the phenomenon relied on figure/ground segregation ANSWER: a 8. Gestalt psychologists used the example of illusory contours to support the claim that _____. a. perceptions are formed by combining sensations b. vision can be modeled on computer processing c. the whole is different than the sum of its parts d. experience determines perceptual interpretation ANSWER: c 9. The Olympic symbol is an example of the Gestalt principle of _____. a. proximity b. pragnanz c. common fate d. synchrony ANSWER: b 10. The principle of _____ can account for grouping of stimuli that share orientation, shape, and/or size. a. segregatio n b. shape c. identity d. similarity ANSWER: d 11. Corey looks at a flock of seagulls flying in one direction, when suddenly, five of the seagulls start flying in another direction. He now perceives two groups of birds, because of the Gestalt principle of _____. a. common fate b. uniform connectedness c. synchrony d. pragnanz. : Perceiving Objects and Scenes ANSWER: a 12. Alyson looks at a picture of arrows and sees white arrows pointing to the right against a black background. She looks at the picture longer, and then sees black arrows pointing to the left against a white background. Her perception of this stimulus is an example of _____. a. perceptual segregation b. binocular rivalry c. view invariance d. orientation invariance ANSWER: a 13. In a scene, the objects in the foreground are best described as _____, whereas the image making up the background is best described as the _____. a. object; setting b. ground; figure c. near point; distance d. figure; ground ANSWER: d 14. Border ownership means that when figure-ground segregation occurs, the border between the figure and background _____. a. seems to change color b. is perceived to be associated with the background c. is perceived to be associated with the figure d. seems to disappear ANSWER: c 15. Which of the following is a general determinant of figure-ground segregation? a. The right side is more likely to be perceived as a figure than the left. b. Small stimuli are more likely to be perceived as ground than figure. c. Near the shared borders, figure is seen as unformed material. d. A lower region is more likely to be perceived as figure than an upper region. ANSWER: d 16. Sally recently looked at some visual illusions. In one reversible-image illusion, she saw a vase in the middle of a blue box. What is Sally most likely to remember about this illusion? a. details about the box b. the two faces on the side of the face c. the vase she saw in the illusion d. the lower half of the image ANSWER: c : Perceiving Objects and Scenes 17. In one reversible figure/ground study, Gibson and Peterson (1994) used an image in which one area looks like a woman when upright, but does not resemble anything when turned upside down. Their general finding was that _____. a. meaningfulness of an image had a large effect on figure-ground segregation b. meaningful images were just as likely to be seen as figure or ground c. inverting the entire image lead to slower response times d. meaningfulness only had an effect when they appeared on the left side ANSWER: a 18. The Bev Doolittle print of “The Forest Has Eyes” exemplifies the way _____ affects perceptual organization. a. proximity b. common region c. Meaningfulnes s d. common fate ANSWER: c 19. Humans need approximately _____ to perceive the gist of a scene. a. 250 milliseconds b. 1000 milliseconds c. 2 seconds d. 5 seconds ANSWER: a 20. A masking stimulus is primarily used to _____. a. stop persistence of vision b. increase the duration of persistence of vision c. increase the area of the “region-of-interest” d. hide the purpose of the experiment from participants ANSWER: a 21. Based on Fei-Fei et al. (2007), smaller objects within a scene are typically recognized within _____. a. 50 milliseconds b. 150 milliseconds c. 500 milliseconds d. 1000 milliseconds ANSWER: c 22. Global image features are _____. a. individualistic b. slowly perceived : Perceiving Objects and Scenes c. slowly processed d. holistic ANSWER: d 23. Suppose you were to review dozens of photographs of various natural and manmade scenes on social media. You would expect that _____. a. horizontal and vertical orientations would be most common b. diagonal orientations would be most common c. the major environmental regularities would be incompatible with Gestalt principals d. environmental irregularities would be more salient than environmental regularities ANSWER: a 24. The _____ effect is that humans perceive horizontals and verticals more easily than other orientations. a. Turing b. Oblique c. spreading d. visual persistence ANSWER: b 25. Jimmy looks at a picture of a side of a submarine that has dents and bumps on it. When he turns the picture upsidedown, what he originally perceived as bumps, now look like dents, and vice versa. This is due to _____. a. figure-ground reversal b. the oblique effect c. accidental properties of light d. the “light-from-above” assumption ANSWER: d 26. Humans use the _____ to distinguish shape from shading. a. environmental assumption b. light-from-above assumption c. proximity principle d. delayed-matching principle ANSWER: b 27. When Palmer (1975) showed observers a kitchen scene and then a target picture, which picture was identified correctly 80% of the time? a. A loaf of bread, because it matches the context of the scene b. A mailbox, because it seems so out-of-context, that it “pops-out” c. A drum, because participants were music majors : Perceiving Objects and Scenes d. A bedroom, because it is from the same category ANSWER: a 28. The theory of unconscious inference _____. a. replaced the Bayesian inference approach b. is closely related to the “likelihood principle” c. describes the use of algorithms in perception d. is incompatible with Gestalt psychology. ANSWER: b 29. If two eyes receive totally different images and the brain can’t combine the two images, a condition called _____ results. a. delayed processing b. persistence of vision c. binocular rivalry d. visual masking ANSWER: c 30. _____ objects are ones that, when seen or imagined in isolation, evoke a strong sense of surrounding space. a. Idiosyncratic b. Spatiallybound c. Characteristic d. Space defining ANSWER: d 31. Tong et al. (1998) used binocular rivalry to test brain responses when the person perceived a house or a face. When the person perceived the house, activity in the _____. a. PPA increased, but not in the FFA b. FFA increased, but not in PPA c. PPA and the FFA increased d. PPA and the FFA decreased ANSWER: a 32. A voxel is _____. a. a small cube-shaped area of the brain about 2 mm on each side b. an electrode used to measure brain activity c. the basic unit of sensation d. the retinal area on which an image is projected ANSWER: a 33. Kamitani and Tong (2005) developed “orientation decoders”. When eight orientations were tested, the decoders were Perceiving Objects and Scenes able to correctly predict what orientation a person was looking at for _____ of the eight gratings. a. two b. four c. six d. eight ANSWER: d 34. Naselaris et al. (2009) developed the _____ decoder, which is used to make predictions about characteristics of a scene such as contrast and shape. a. form b. structural c. orientatio n d. semantic ANSWER: b 35. The _____ decoder is intended to discriminate between different categories of images, such as outdoor scenes and portraits. a. orientatio n b. structure c. scene d. semantic ANSWER: d 36. Which of the following is true regarding inversion effects? a. Faces and other objects are equally affected by inversion. b. Face processing is slowed more than that of other objects. c. Object identification is not affected by inversion. d. They demonstrate that faces are processed by feature. ANSWER: b 37. Perceiving the emotional aspects of a face are reflected by activation in the brain structure called the _____. a. amygdala b. medulla c. IT cortex d. superior temporal sulcus ANSWER: a 38. The preferential looking technique showed that infants as young as _____ will look at their mother’s face than a stranger’s face. : Perceiving Objects and Scenes a. two-days-old b. one-week-old c. one-month-old d. six-monthsold ANSWER: a 39. Research has shown that an infant can visually recognize his/her mother’s face from _____. a. the contrast between her eye color and face b. her smile c. the contrast between her hairline and forehead d. her overall head shape ANSWER: c 40. The ability to recognize faces, including identifying expressions, is not fully developed until approximately _____. a. late infancy b. early childhood c. late childhood d. adolescence or early adulthood ANSWER: d Essay 41. Discuss three reasons why object perception is difficult for computer vision. ANSWER: The stimulus on the receptor can be ambiguous. Objects can be hidden or blurred. Objects look different from different viewpoints. 42. State, define, and give an example (in words and/or drawings) for each of five Gestalt principles of perceptual organization. ANSWERThe principle of good continuation states the following: Points that, when connected, : result in straight or smoothly curving lines are seen as belonging together, and the lines tend to be seen in such a way as to follow the smoothest path The principle of pragnanz, also called the principle of good figure or the principle of simplicity states: Every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible. According to the principle of similarity, similar things appear to be grouped together. According to the principle of proximity, or nearness, things that are near each other appear to be grouped together. According to the principle of common fate, things that are moving in the same direction appear to be grouped together. According to the principle of common region, elements that are within the same region of space appear to be grouped together. According to the principle of uniform connectedness, a connected region of the same : Perceiving Objects and Scenes visual properties, such as lightness, color, texture, or motion, is perceived as a single unit. 43. Describe two image-based factors that determine what area is seen as “figure” in an image with reversible figureground. Draw an example that demonstrates each factor. ANSWEROne image-based factor proposed by the Gestalt psychologists was that areas lower in : the field of view are more likely to be perceived as figure. Another Gestalt proposal was that figures are more likely to be perceived on the convex side of borders 44. Name and describe five “global image features”. ANSWERDegree of naturalness. Natural scenes have textured zones and undulating contours. : Man-made scenes, such as the street, are dominated by straight lines and horizontals and verticals. Degree of openness. Open scenes, such as the ocean, often have a visible horizon line and contain few objects. The street scene is also open, although not as much as the ocean scene. The forest is an example of a scene with a low degree of openness. Degree of roughness. Smooth scenes (low roughness) like the ocean contain fewer small elements. Scenes with high roughness like the forest contain many small elements and are more complex. Degree of expansion. The convergence of parallel lines, like what you see when you look down railroad tracks that appear to vanish in the distance indicates a high degree of expansion. This feature is especially dependent on the observer’s viewpoint. Color. Some scenes have characteristic colors, like the ocean scene (blue) and the forest (green and brown). 45. Describe the main finding from binocular rivalry research and explain why that finding is important. ANSWERObservers in Tong et al.’s (1998) experiment viewed the overlapping red house and : green face through red–green glasses, so the house image was presented to the right eye and the face image to the left eye. Because of binocular rivalry, the observers’ perception alternated back and forth between the face and the house. When the observers perceived the house, activity occurred in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) in the left and right hemispheres (red ellipses). When observers perceived the face, activity occurred in the fusiform face area (FFA) in the left hemisphere (green ellipse). This experiment and others like it generated a great deal of excitement among brain researchers because they measured brain activation and perception simultaneously and demonstrated a dynamic relationship between perception and brain activity in which changes in perception and changes in brain activity mirrored each other. 46. Define semantic regularities and describe their effect on perceptual organization. ANSWERIn language, semantics refers to the meanings of words or sentences. Applied to : perceiving scenes, semantics refers to the meaning of a scene. This meaning is often related to what happens within a scene. For example, food preparation, cooking, and perhaps eating occur in a kitchen; waiting around, buying tickets, checking luggage, and going through security checkpoints happen in airports. Semantic regularities are the characteristics associated with activities that are common in different types of scenes. Most people who have grown up in modern society have little trouble visualizing an : Perceiving Objects and Scenes office or the clothing section of a department store. What is important about this ability, for our purposes, is that part of this visualization involves details within these scenes. Most people see an office as having a desk with a computer on it, bookshelves, and a chair. The department store scene may contain racks of clothes, a changing room, and perhaps a cash register. Our visualizations contain information based on our knowledge of different kinds of scenes. This knowledge of what a given scene typically contains is called a scene schema. 47. Describe the how Bayesian inference can be used to understand perception. ANSWERBayesian inference was named after Thomas Bayes (1701–1761), who proposed that : our estimate of the probability of an outcome is determined by two factors: (1) the prior probability, or simply the prior, which is our initial estimate of the probability of an outcome, and (2) the extent to which the available evidence is consistent with the outcome. This second factor is called the likelihood of the outcome. Applying this idea to object perception, let’s return to the inverse projection problem. Remember that the inverse projection problem occurs because a huge number of possible objects could be associated with a particular image on the retina. So the problem is how to determine what is “out there” that is causing a particular retinal image. Luckily, we don’t have to rely only on the retinal image, because we come to most perceptual situations with prior probabilities based on our past experiences. One of the priors you have in your head is that books are rectangular. Thus, when you look at a book on your desk, your initial belief is that it is likely that the book is rectangular. The likelihood that the book is rectangular is provided by additional evidence such as the book’s retinal image, combined with your perception of the book’s distance and the angle at which you are viewing the book. If this additional evidence is consistent with your prior that the book is rectangular, the likelihood is high and the perception “rectangular” is strengthened. Further testing by changing your viewing angle and distance can further strengthen the conclusion that the shape is a rectangle. Note that you aren’t necessarily conscious of this testing process - it occurs automatically and rapidly. The important point about this process is that while the retinal image is still the starting point for perceiving the shape of the book, adding the person’s prior beliefs reduces the possible shapes that could be causing that image. 48. Describe the decoders developed by Naselaris et al. (2009), how they were established, and what they can be used for. ANSWERThomas Naselaris and coworkers (2009) created a brain reading device by developing : two methods for analyzing the patterns of voxel activation recorded from visual areas of an observer’s brain. The first method, called structural encoding, is based on the relationship between voxel activation and structural characteristics of a scene, such as lines, contrasts, shapes, and textures. Naselaris’s structural decoder was calibrated by presenting a large number of images, and determining how voxels responded to specific features of each scene, such as line orientation, detail, and the position of the image. These data were used to calibrate the structural encoder so it could use patterns of voxel responses to predict the features of the image that the subject was viewing. The second method for analyzing patterns of voxel activation, called semantic encoding, is based on the relationship between voxel activation and the meaning or category of a scene. The semantic encoder is calibrated by measuring the pattern of voxel activation to a large number of images that have previously been classified into categories such as “crowd,” “portrait,” “vehicle,” and “outdoor.” From this calibration, : Perceiving Objects and Scenes the relationship between the pattern of voxel activation and image category is determined. This semantic decoder then uses the pattern of voxel responses to make predictions about the type of scene the subject is viewing. 49. Explain how grouping and segregation work together to organize perception. ANSWERPerceptual organization is the process by which elements in the environment become : perceptually grouped to create our perception of objects. During this process, incoming stimulation is organized into coherent units such as objects. The process of perceptual organization involves two components: grouping and segregation. Grouping is the process by which visual events are “put together” into units or objects. The process of grouping works in conjunction with segregation, which is the process of separating one area or object from another. Thus, seeing two buildings as separate from one another, with borders indicating where one building ends and the other begins, involves segregation. 50. Describe what is known about the ability of infants to perceive human faces. ANSWERHuman faces are among the most important stimuli in an infant’s environment. As a : newborn or young infant stares up from the crib, numerous faces of interested adults appear in the infant’s ﬁeld of view. The face that the infant sees most frequently is usually the mother’s, and there is evidence that young infants can recognize their mother’s face shortly after they are born. Using preferential looking in which 2-day-old infants were given a choice between their mother’s face and a stranger’s, Ian Bushnell and coworkers (1989) found that newborns looked at the mother about 63 percent of the time. This result is above the 50 percent chance level, so Bushnell concluded that the 2-day-olds could recognize their mother’s face. To determine what information the infants might be using to recognize the mother’s face, Olivier Pascalis and coworkers (1995) showed that when the mother and the stranger wore pink scarves that covered their hairline, the preference for the mother disappeared. The high-contrast border between the mother’s dark hairline and light forehead apparently provide important information about the mother’s physical characteristics that infants use to recognize the mother. There is also evidence for a role of experience in infant face perception. Ian Bushnell (2001) observed newborns over the ﬁrst 3 days of life to determine whether there was a relationship between their looking behavior and the amount of time they were with their mother. He found that at 3 days of age, when the infants were given a choice between looking at a stranger’s face or their mother’s face, the infants who had been exposed to their mother longer were more likely to prefer her over the stranger. The two infants with the lowest exposure to the mother (an average of 1.5 hours) divided their looking evenly between the mother and stranger, but the two infants with the longest exposure (an average of 7.5 hours) looked at the mother 68 percent of the time. Analyzing the results from all of the infants led Bushnell to conclude that face perception emerges very rapidly after birth, but that experience in looking at faces does have an effect. Although the infant’s ability to recognize faces develops rapidly over the first few months, these impressive gains are only a starting point, because even though 3- to 4-month-old infants can recognize some facial expressions, their ability to identify faces doesn’t reach adult levels until adolescence or early adulthood.