Final Blog Entry

Apparently I have no concept of time when studying…but I thought I would post anyway.

The most suprising/interesting/unexpected thing I’ve learned in perception is hard to pinpoint. Mostly because we covered so many topics and ideas that aren’t even hinted at in other classes. I thought it was crazy to hear that people actually see colors with letters, or that “hungry” neurons in the somatosensory cortex take over for inactive ones in the absence of a body part. Syndromes like synesthesia and phantom limb syndrome seemed like issues (or gifts) only mentally ill, or heavily drugged, people had. It suprised me there is factual evidence that people see and feel these things. The underlying factor for why the class was interesting as a whole, is that it relates to every one of us. More often than not the systems or ideas covered in class were functioning in our bodies as we were learning about them. My favorite lectures and chapters in the book were the ones that covered color perception. I paint often and it was useful to learn how we perceive color. It was also fun to be tricked in class, and unbelievable that it would work everytime (I thought for sure the budda was growing or shrinking, but obviously I was wrong). I also liked that I could trick my friends, and roomate, as part of my studying.

Finger Paint!

This post is just an extra….

2.      What is the difference between adding and subtracting colors?  What does that even mean?

Subtractive and additive color mixing are pretty familiar concepts, although we may not realize it. When a painter mixes colors to together such as yellow and blue to get green, he is making a subtractive color mixture. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it makes sense. Yellow and blue, when placed together, subtract a portion of light that would otherwise be reflected and visible. The yellow pigment is absorbing a portion of the short wavelength light from the blue pigment. Meanwhile the blue pigment is absorbing a portion of long wavelength light. The result is a new color, green, that doesn’t resemble either of the original colors. Its wavelength corresponds with the only shared part of the spectrum between yellow and blue around 500nm. Additive color mixing is used every time you watch a baseball game or scary movie. Color television is a result of additive color mixing. Many small dots of colored light create a larger image by blending together.  

Spirals and Swirls

4. What is the aperture problem?

     By definition the aperture problem “is the inability of a motion sensor with a restricted field of view to register unambiguously the direction of motion of an extended contour moving through the sensor’s field of view”. If you are like me, however, that definition is very long and confusing so I will explain it in layman’s terms. Most of us have seen the aperture problem in action by staring at a barber’s pole. They are pretty mesmerizing things. The stripes on a barber’s pole look like they are moving in an upward spiral continuously. Obviously this is not the case because the stripes aren’t going anywhere at all. They are rotating however, but the spiral is just in our mind.

       Direction-selective neurons are neurons that respond very strongly to a particular motion in a particular direction. Two different regions of the retina provide input to one DS neuron. When movement strikes one region and then the other region in the correct order and in the right amount of time, the DS cell will fire. The issue is that DS cells are fairly “close-minded” and respond only to events within its receptive field. Therefore another movement at the same velocity that hits the receptive field (or aperture) could evoke the same response as another similar movement. When we rely on these neurons, our movement comprehension is slightly ambiguous.  Basically the pattern of movement we see could be produced by several different scenarios. If we are in this situation the simplest motion is the one we believe, which is usually continuous motion. That is why a barber’s pole does not look like a bunch of lines it looks like a spiral because our visual system prefers continuous motion.    

Why you’d have to go and make things so COMPLICATED (avril)

3.      Why do you think there are so many areas of cortex devoted to the processing of different types of visual information?

 

I feel that every time someone is diagnosed with a new visual disorder we learn more about how the visual cortex works. Who would have thought that there was a brain area just for face recognition? We need many areas of the cortex for vision because we are constantly taking in massive amounts of visual information and forming actions based on that information. We move our eyes often so there is a new set of stimuli every time we shift our head. We also must alert our eyes to close our eyelids to blink, which then means we have to temporarily “turn-off” our vision so that the blackout from a blink does not affect our vision. In just this one act of blinking there must be pathways to the motor system, and the visual system, as well as feedback mechanisms. Other tasks we perform that are more complex than just “seeing”, include object recognition, understanding motion, and even remembering an object’s position in 3D space. The map on pg.138 in the textbook shows the pathways visual information takes and areas of the brain it activates, and this map is very detailed and large. We not only respond to stimulus by seeing, but we also organize that information in many different ways and comprehend it on many different levels. Many times we focus our gaze on the person we are talking to, while still being aware of our surroundings. Sometimes we even picture what the speaker is saying. If that’s not complicated for our brain’s to preform I don’t know what is.  

 

 

Movies are visual tricksters…

Movies are probably the most tricky when it comes to visual inattentiveness. I think screenwriters and directors go to film school to see how many things they can hide in movies. There are countless movies where you have to watch them a few times to catch all the hidden clues. However, if you see them once or if someone points them out to you, you can’t miss them again.  Movies can distract you with loud sounds, or odd lighting to help them draw your attention to one side of the screen while something obvious is happening on the other side. Another common trick in movies is to flash an image on the screen really fast so you miss it. The last scene from the movie Fight Club is a prime example of this. At the end of the movie and very obscene picture flashes on the screen just long enough for a viewer to notice something happened, but not long enough to determine what the picture is of.

For another example, my roommate last year showed me the same movie that we watched in class. Then she asked if I saw the monkey. I looked at her like she was insane. I was absolutely positive that there was not a monkey in the video clip at all, and almost made a bet on it. Once she played it a second time for me I felt like an idiot. It was astonishing to me that my brain filled in most scene for of kids playing ball and I had no idea. It actually reminded me of a few philosophers who believe the senses are deceiving. I disagreed with them before, but after taking this class and watching that video, I think I agree.  

Cortical Magnification

Cortical magnification describes how information is processed in the visual cortex. Neuron location in the visual field determines the size of the receptive field. Neurons closer to the fovea of the retina have smaller receptive fields, which corresponds to a larger number of neurons. Therefore the visual acuity in the fovea is greater than in the peripheral areas of the retina because there are more neurons responding to a stimulus, and the receptive fields are smaller and more sensitive to fine detail. If we did not have cortical magnification then either of two situations could occur. We would either have visual field represented like it is in peripheral or the fovea. If all vision was like the peripheral then it would be difficult to detect fine details. Edges would be less defined and tasks that require fine detail, like using a calculator or cell phone would be difficult. On the other hand, if the visual field was uniformly represented like it is in the fovea then our brains would be on overload. There would be excessive information about our surroundings when it was unnecessary. I like the fact that if I am trying to read a book I can not see every fine detail about the room around me. Of course I could look around if I needed to and see plenty of detail, but because of cortical magnification I can focus on just a few words on a page at a time and not feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of other sentences on the page.

 “The eye is at once the master and slave of vision.”  

       I feel that is quote is very true. We have seen in class that optical illusions are created fairly often. The reason most of these illusions occur is not because we have problems with our eyes. Instead they occur because of our other inputs that create our “vision”. The eye in this way is a slave to vision. The eye believes what it has been conditioned to believe by the mind in many situations. Although we would like to believe that our vision is like perfect camera, it is more like a rose tinted lens; a rose lens that we have looked out of for so long that the outside world seems completely normal. Feedback mechanisms also manipulate what we are technically “seeing”. Imagine trying to focus on all the stimuli present in your visual field right now. Your brain would go on overload.

      The eye is also the master of vision because with out eyes vision would be impossible. The eyes are the first place to receive input from the outside visual world, and where those images are processed. In this way vision is dependent on the eye, however, what we actually believe we are “seeing” is affected by other brain areas, and not just our eyes.

don’t go Jason Waterfalls…

“Mondegreens” are lyrics that are misheard.  Ever hear anything funny? 

I have done this on countless occasions. When I was little I would guess what the next word of a song would be in my head and then listen to see if I was right. Actually most of the time I wasn’t thinking about the next word in my head, I was already singing my make believe word out loud. I thought if I listened well enough I could tell what the artist was trying to say and then I would definitely be able to tell which words were next. Maybe it was an only child thing…but I enjoyed myself and my parents never acted like they could tell I was making things up. Anyway when I got older making up words became more obvious. In middle school I remember thinking the really popular TLC song about chasing waterfalls was about a boy by the name of Jason Waterfalls and they were asking him not to leave. I also remember a Beyonce song where I could have sworn they were singing about a baguette (bread loaf…seems to make sense right?). Needless to say I got laughed at. Lyrics in songs are so tricky because every singer has their own accent. Also singers will pronounce words in the weirdest ways in order to make the cadence or rhythm of a song sound right. This happens in regular speech too. Someone will think they heard one thing when it is entirely wrong. I feel that if we relied on letters, or single sounds, instead of words it would be so confusing. No matter how well someone articulates certain sounds are exactly what the book calls them, ambiguous. Many people clearly have a problem with this, otherwise flight attendants wouldn’t say, ”C as is Charlie” or “B as in Bravo” when they announce connecting flights. On a slightly different tangent there is also a game where something that is mouthed sounds completely different than it looks. The words “olive juice” if mouthed slowly and in a slightly seductive manner look like the word “i love you”. 

Blindness would cut me off from people…

Helen Keller said, “Blindness cuts me off from things;deafness cuts me off from people.” What do you think about this statement?

      I know we talked about this for a while in class, but strongly disagree. Being deaf would definitely make me feel isolated, but so would losing any sense. In class someone mentioned that maybe Helen Keller felt this way because she never saw the world around her, so she didn’t know what she was missing. I completely agree. I also feel that being blind almost hinders a person more than being deaf. If someone is deaf they can still lip read, email, write blogs on word press,  text message, instant message, read body language, watch movies with subtitles, use sign language, see facial expressions, and also enjoy art, colors, and landscapes. As a better example, I still get plenty of enjoyment out of a movie with subtitles or without sound, and would prefer it any day to a book on tape.                       

           In my interactions with people, communication is mostly based on body language and facial expressions, and not the words that are being said. Ok words do matter and the previous statement is a generalization, but sign language/lip reading are just as effective as spoken words, minus tone. They both allow two people to see each other and sympathize with one another and I feel that we as humans connect this way the most. I know that if someone looks at a picture of a person in pain they sympathize with that person and pain areas activate in the brain. I’m curious if this happens when listening, If I were to listen to a worried person on a tape recorder would my worry/anxiety areas activate? All and all I feel that the visual world has so much to offer in the way of personal communication that it would be much more isolating than being deaf.

Abercrombie & Fitch

 We talked about the commercialization of smell. How, if at all, do you think smell influence your buying behavior?In high school I worked in retail because it was a minimal time commitment and a fun job. For two and a half years I worked for Abercrombie & Fitch. One year was spent in the Hollister Co. store and the last year and half I was in the regular Abercrombie & Fitch store. If any one has ever been in either store, or even in a mall that has one of these stores, the smell is VERY potent. Although it is debatable if smell influences your buying, as a former employee of a company that devotes so much of its marketing and smells I do believe it has an impact.  I mentioned that Abercrombie devotes a lot of time to marketing and a large part of it is smell related, but here are a few details. The store is to be “spritzed” every hour. Spritzing involves spraying each mannequin in entire store 2-3 times and spraying particular racks of clothing. Also the line that every cashier must say before he/she rings you up is, “What’s your favorite Abercrombie fragrance?”. When a new fragrance was released I was a spritz girl for a week. This entailed asking every customer, “Have you met Jake and Milia?” which was the names of the new cologne and perfume, not the names of people. Abercrombie paid me to walk around and ask this for a week, they also fully outfitted me in $200 worth of clothing to specifically while saying my line. I’m not sure if you have followed all of these details but I’m sure you can see that there is a lot of time devoted to scent in this clothing store where I worked. And I do believe it has an impact. Whenever I would buy clothes from A&F I never wanted the smell of the perfume/cologne mix to come out of my clothing. The smell could have been awful, but I started to associate the smell with cute new clothes, and the fun I had while working there. I’ve heard from other people too that they love the smell of A&F clothes when they first get them. I believe in aromatherapy to an extent and I think that there is probably a particular smell, that when placed in retail setting, would increase consumerism by about 40% at least.  Abercrombie’s sales have steadily done well since 1892, so I guess the smell marketing technique has some relevance.