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.