What do you see? A hat? An elephant? A snake? An elephant and a snake?
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Transcript of What do you see? A hat? An elephant? A snake? An elephant and a snake?
The Interface Theory of Perception
What do you see?
A hat? An elephant?
A snake? An elephant and a snake?
If you have seen this image before….
How about out in the World? In Real Life. What do we see? What is it that we perceive?
The Conventional view of perception
“A primary goal of perception is to recover, or estimate, objective properties of the physical
world. A primary goal of perceptual categorization is to recover, or estimate, the objective statistical structure of the physical
world.”
Bayes’ Theorem
Which object is casting the shadow?
Bayes’ Circle“We can only see the world through our
posteriors. When we measure priors and
likelihoods in the world, our
measurements are necessarily altered
through our posteriors. Using our
measurements of priors and likelihoods to
justify our posteriors thus leads to a
vicious circle.”
Bayes’ CircleThis essentially means that in order to know or
perceive the world, we must have a prior knowledge or perception of it to compare to.
HMMMMMM
Maybe not a reconstruction
?
Let’s examine a perceptual mistake
Somewhere in Australia
Shiny – checkDimpled – checkYellow brown –check
Desirable female ?It must be …..Oh no, not really
What’s wrong with this picture?
The Interface Theory of Perception
The perceptions of an organism are a
user interface between that
organism and the objective world
An interface
An interface
Do I really want or need to know all this?
Where is my
file????
An interface is
helpful!
Conventional TheoryReconstruction Thesis
“Perception reconstructs certain properties and categories of the objective world” (Hoffman). In essence, what you see is what you literally get. There are infinitely many and infinitely complex
possibilities in the objective reality.
Interface TheoryConstruction Thesis
“Perception constructs the properties and categories of an organism’s perceptual world” (Hoffman). In a sense, we perceive only the necessary qualities
of the objective reality. Our perceptual systems instead display relevant
representations of more complex phenomena in a simpler form, much like icons on a computer.
Interface Theory of Perception predicts that
Each species has its own interfaceAlmost surely, no interface performs reconstructionEach interface is tailored to guide adaptive behavior in a
relevant niche Much of the competition between and within species
exploits the strength and limitations of interfacesSuch competition can lead to arms races between
interfaces and critically influence their adaptive evolution.
Reconstruction? Model? Need for Isomorphism?Perception is indeed qualitatively different from the
represented physical reality: here Hoffman is right Perception is not a reconstruction but it is a
representationIs Hoffman correct in maintaining that perception
doesn’t even need an ‘isomorphism’ with reality?2D retinotopic neural maps as an example of
isomorphismGiven isomorphism, can we think of perception as a
model of reality, hence constructed if not reconstructed?
ReferencesD. Hoffman.
The interface theory of perception: Natural selection drives true perception to swift extinction. In Object categorization: Computer and human vision perspectives, S. Dickinson, M. Tarr, A. Leonardis, B. Schiele (Eds.) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 148–165.
J.P. Frisby and J.V. Stone Seeing The Computational Approach to Biological Vision, 2nd Edition, The MIT Press 2010