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Visual World (visual + world)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Psychology	57%
Humanities and Social Sciences	28%

Selected Abstracts

How Infants Learn About the Visual World

COGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 7 2010
Scott P. Johnson
Abstract The visual world of adults consists of objects at various distances, partly occluding one another, substantial and stable across space and time. The visual world of young infants, in contrast, is often fragmented and unstable, consisting not of coherent objects but rather surfaces that move in unpredictable ways. Evidence from computational modeling and from experiments with human infants highlights three kinds of learning that contribute to infants' knowledge of the visual world: learning via association, learning via active assembly, and learning via visual-manual exploration. Infants acquire knowledge by observing objects move in and out of sight, forming associations of these different views. In addition, the infant's own self-produced behavior,oculomotor patterns and manual experience, in particular,is an important means by which infants discover and construct their visual world. [source]

From wilderness to bewilderment: Which frontier does your type face?

DESIGN MANAGEMENT REVIEW, Issue 4 2003
Nathan Felde
In a poetic commentary that highlights contributions made by pioneers in communications thinking, Nathan Felde ponders how technology,now so pervasively able to gather information, capture what formerly was invisible, camouflage reality, and target audiences-comprises and compromises the expression of individuality in the visual world. It is a treatise cautioning all to remember that design must ennoble rather than devalue the human being. [source]

Interrupting infants' persisting object representations: an object-based limit?

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 5 2006
Erik W. Cheries
Making sense of the visual world requires keeping track of objects as the same persisting individuals over time and occlusion. Here we implement a new paradigm using 10-month-old infants to explore the processes and representations that support this ability in two ways. First, we demonstrate that persisting object representations can be maintained over brief interruptions from additional independent events , just as a memory of a traffic scene may be maintained through a brief glance in the rearview mirror. Second, we demonstrate that this ability is nevertheless subject to an object-based limit: if an interrupting event involves enough objects (carefully controlling for overall salience), then it will impair the maintenance of other persisting object representations even though it is an independent event. These experiments demonstrate how object representations can be studied via their ,interruptibility', and the results are consistent with the idea that infants' persisting object representations are constructed and maintained by capacity-limited mid-level ,object-files'. [source]

The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 2 2003
Stuart Clark
Apparitions were the subject of fierce theological and philosophical debate in the period after the Reformation. But these controversies also raised issues fundamental to the nature and organization of human vision. They crossed and recrossed the boundaries between religion and the science and psychology of optics. Apparitions, after all, are things that appear, and spectres are things that are seen. Before they could mean anything to anyone they had to be correctly identified as phenomena. Their religious role, whether Protestant or Catholic, presupposed a perceptual judgement , essentially visual in character , about just what they were. During the early modern period this judgement , this visual identification , became vastly more complex and contentious than ever before, certainly much more so than in the case of medieval ghosts. The sceptics, natural magicians, and atheists turned apparitions into optical tricks played by nature or human artifice; the religious controversialists and demonologists thought that demons might also be responsible. This essay argues that the debate that ensued, irrespective of the confessional allegiances of the protagonists, was the occasion for some of the most sustained and sophisticated of the early modern arguments about truth and illusion in the visual world. [source]

Is Berkeley's World a Divine Language?

MODERN THEOLOGY, Issue 3 2002
James P. Danaher
George Berkeley (1685,1753) believed that the visible world was a series of signs that constituted a divine language through which God was speaking to us. Given the nature of language and the nature of the visual world, this paper examines to what extent the visual world could be a divine language and to what extent God could speak to us through it. [source]

Early neural activity in Necker-cube reversal: Evidence for low-level processing of a gestalt phenomenon

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, Issue 1 2004
Jürgen Kornmeier
Abstract Normally we experience the visual world as stable. Ambiguous figures provide a fascinating exception: On prolonged inspection, the "Necker cube" undergoes a sudden, unavoidable reversal of its perceived front-back orientation. What happens in the brain when spontaneously switching between these equally likely interpretations? Does neural processing differ between an endogenously perceived reversal of a physically unchanged ambiguous stimulus and an exogenously caused reversal of an unambiguous stimulus? A refined EEG paradigm to measure such endogenous events uncovered an early electrophysiological correlate of this spontaneous reversal, a negativity beginning at 160 ms. Comparing across nine electrode locations suggests that this component originates in early visual areas. An EEG component of similar shape and scalp distribution, but 50 ms earlier, was evoked by an external reversal of unambiguous figures. Perceptual disambiguation seems to be accomplished by the same structures that represent objects per se, and to occur early in the visual stream. This suggests that low-level mechanisms play a crucial role in resolving perceptual ambiguity. [source]