Event Detail

Fri Oct 22, 2010
5101 Tolman
11 AM–1 PM
Irv Rock Memorial Lecture
Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Cathleen Moore (University of Iowa)
Attention, organization and perceptual experience: A story of indirect perception

I read Irvin Rock’s book The Logic of Perception in college. I read his book Indirect Perception ten years later. Only after having been in the business of attention and perception research long enough to look backward a bit, however, did I realize how much his ideas influenced my work, directly or—perhaps as he would have preferred—indirectly. I will present a set of studies on visual attention and perception that address a wide variety of specific questions. In particular, I will present work in which my students and I asked how unattended visual information is, and is not, processed; when within the information processing stream spurious changes in illumination (e.g., shadows) are discounted relative to when visual search processes are engaged; how the visual system “knows” which stimulus corresponds to which “object” in dynamic visual representations (i.e., object correspondence across time and space); and what impact perceptual organization has on the updating of dynamic visual representations. Contrary to the apparent disparity of this set of questions, there is a coherent story to be told within the context of Rock’s ideas about indirect perception.