Maybe these two are related. I was showing some interactive slides in class, talking about pattern recognition in my cognitive course when several interesting events occurred across students for which I have no surefire explanation.
Situation 1: I first showed students a picture of a Bev Doolittle art piece called The Forest Has Eyes, which you can see here; http://www.artcountrycanada.com/doolittle.htm. This requires some rather global processing as many pieces or parts of the scenery compose faces. There are 12 faces in the image in case anyone is interested in finding them all. So then I showed the picture of the face among coffee beans, which can be seen here: http://www.moillusions.com/coffe-illusion/ (BTW I disagree that this is an optical illusion; the face is quite clear once the pattern recognition has decoded it. Why would this be considered to be an illusion?) At least a couple of more vocal students noted that they were familiar with the face in the coffee beans but completely failed to find it; I suggested that they might have been primed for a more global search, rather than a local search, that they were looking for images more like the ones in the Doolittle art piece and so even though they were familiar with the second image and the images were separated by about 15-20 minutes and other pattern recognition tasks we played around with in class, they completely failed at the second task. I suggested it might have been this type of priming effect but they wanted to know how the effect could be so strong and last so long past all the other images they had engaged with in between, Does anyone have a better explanation than priming? Does anyone have some information for me on priming to explain the effect if there is an agreement that it is visual priming? I know a bit about priming for verbal stimuli but this one I don't know as much about. As an aside this recently made the rounds on facebook: https://ifunny.co/tags/Tribbles Situation 2: We were examining Biederman's geon model and I have an image from a textbook which features a tea kettle shot from above where the vertices of distinct features such as the spout/neck of the kettle that are occluded by the handled in the overhead view. Now in this image the kettle is sitting on a tiled countertop. So after some lengthy discussion in which students mostly agreed it looked to them like a round handle type device to turn on the shower, we went into a discussion of the tile background. That had completely thrown the students off. None of them had ever seen a tile countertop but all of them had seen tiles in the bathroom. (I'm in India ;-) I tried surfing the net for the image but it must be proprietary to the text book :( This is the closest I can find but it doesn't have the tiled background. http://us.123rf.com/450wm/dmitryzimin/dmitryzimin1501/dmitryzimin150100033/35202152-chinese-tea-pot-on-a-black-background--overhead-view.jpg?ver=6 So the overhead shot of the kettle with the vertices of critical elements obscured, along with the lack of an experiential frame of reference for the context, seems to have thrown off the whole process of pattern recognition. One student did say she thought it was a tea kettle, so at least one got it; but the rest were really frustrated by my explanation of loss of vertices. Context, or lack thereof, seemed to overwhelm the lack of vertices more than usual and maybe even precluded all other effects. Again, pattern recognition is not a particular forte of mine. So any additional insights would be welcomed. Please do backchannel me because of the time change, I probably won't get the digest until it is too late to see your answers for the remaining class this week. Friday is Idul Juha holiday (Eid al-Adha). I can't believe all the holidays here! :) We get all the usual Christian holidays we celebrate in the US plus all the Muslin, Hindi, Buddhist holidays, as well as more secular Indian holidays like Diwali, coming up shortly. It's a lot of fun, like celebrating Ghandi's birthday or Guru Nanak's birthday, but sort of disrupts the flow of classes ;-) And, BTW India is one of the countries with half hour time changes so I am actually 12,5 hours ahead of my regular home on the US West Coast. LOVE teaching abroad :) Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Visiting Professor, Ashoka University, Delhi, India Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110-2492 [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=46866 or send a blank email to leave-46866-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
