Thursday 25 February 2010

Percepts

We see what we expect to see, which is informed by what we want to see. Although you'd think we see what we see, our processing filters out what is likely to be extraneous detail as we walk along the street (oooh, number 32 has new curtains) and focuses on what's relevant (that Ford Escort is going to run over that 4 year old playing football) but there're plenty of examples to read. I like the examples of text that's gobbledegook because letters are mixed up but it's stlll instantly readable. Or those "tests" where you count the number of letter "f" in a sentence and find you miss out half of them. I love that the moon on the horizon of a city looks huge, but then same moon up high in the middle of the sky in a forest looks tiny. Or that my mind tells me that as I get closer to my car it should double in size as I halve the distance to it, but it doesn't - it looks big when I see it in the car park and doesn't get much bigger as I walk to it - because my brain thinks cars are big so makes them seem so. What we see isn't real.

Perceiving involves seeing something but then our brain processing the image, where it gets complicated and changes the objective detail into a perception, with the perceived image being different from reality.

This means that perception and disorders of perception interest me. Which is probably why this interests me. We see what we expect to see, so don't expect cheating/things not to be where we feel they rightly should be. But mostly I like this because, to me, it look very, very cool :

the ARTIST (gambling demo) from Grecu Andrew on Vimeo.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Great video! Bloke is in Moldova, it would appear.

One of the courses I did at uni required me to read an introductory cognitive psychology textbook. All very interesting, factoids like only 15% of the light that impacts on your retina is actually processed.

The experiments that lead to such conclusions tend to be tedious and involve endless eyetracking and students desperate for a fiver, but this isn't necessary to read the textbook.