Exam 4: Recognizing Visual Objects

According to fMRI experiments that measured activity in the human brain as subjects viewed alternating 30-second sequences of faces versus other types of objects (Kanwisher et al., 1997), a region of the IT cortex responded more vigorously to:

According to the principles of figure-ground organization, a ground is more likely to be perceived in regions:

An individual views a scene through venetian blinds. The horizontal slats give a highly fragmented view of the scene beyond it, yet the scene is effortlessly perceived as a continuous whole, along with the objects in it. Explain why it is possible to view the scene as a unified whole, rather than a series of disconnected rectangular shapes.

According to the principles of perceptual grouping clarified by the Gestalt psychologists, the principle of _____ states that elements that are alike tend to group together.

According to the principles of figure-ground organization, a region with symmetrical borders is more likely to be seen as a _____, and a region with convex (outward-bulging) borders is more likely to be perceived as a _____.

Top-down information flow MOST clearly involves:

According to the principles of figure-ground organization, a region that corresponds to object shapes stored in memory is likely to be perceived as _____, and a region that is asymmetrical is likely to be perceived as _____.

_____ is the first area of the visual cortex that belongs exclusively to the ventral visual pathway.

Perceptual organization, a part of the perceptual process, does NOT:

According to the principles of perceptual grouping clarified by the Gestalt psychologists, the principle of _____ states that two edges that would meet if extended are perceived as a single edge that has been partially occluded.

_____, a complication in the analysis of object recognition, refers to a characteristic of visual scenes in which many objects are scattered in 3-D space, with partial occlusion of various parts of objects by other objects.

_____ uses eigenfaces, which are face images generated from a set of digital images of human faces taken under the same lighting conditions, normalized to line up the eyes and mouths, and rendered with the same spatial resolution.

When watching a soccer game, people perceptually place all the players wearing blue in one group and those wearing white in a separate group. According to the principles of perceptual grouping clarified by the Gestalt psychologists, this illustrates the principle of:

Using heuristics to guide the interpretation of a retinal image based on knowledge of physical regularities in the world is called:

In the context of object recognition, the recognition by components model proposes that:

Explain the results of an fMRI study in which people viewed images of houses, faces, and chairs (Ishai et al., 1999), which suggested that the representation of a viewed object is both modular and distributed.

In the context of neural basis of perceptual grouping, Gray et al. (1989) studied synchronized neural oscillations by recording the responses of pairs of neurons with the same orientation preference in the primary visual cortex of an anesthetized cat. The results showed that:

In the context of neural basis of border ownership assignment in humans, Fang et al. (2009) conducted an fMRI experiment. In the experiment, the participants viewed two pinwheel-like patterns with elongated light and dark wedges. The results of this experiment demonstrated that the neurons in _____ play a role in border assignment.

During an fMRI study conducted by Haxby et al. (2001), people were shown photographs of seven different categories of objects (faces, houses, chairs, bottles, shoes, scissors, and cats), as well as photographs of scrambled images. The researchers found that, by analyzing the spatial distribution of cortical activity within a large swath of the IT cortex, they could:

In the context of object recognition, the approach that is based on the idea that objects are represented in a view-specific manner states that: