Visual Perception

11 Pages 2773 Words

Visual Perception - The function of Neural fatigue in interpreting an ambiguous figure.

Neuro Psychologists around the world have taken much interest in the field of visual perception. These psychologists have conducted many experiments and formed their own theories as to what they perceive are the processes and brain mechanisms involved in visual perception and further, how these processes and brain mechanisms work and interact together. According to Sutherland (1983), visual perception can be identified as the ability to judge distance and depth, to see movement, to recognize objects when seeing them at different distances or from different points of view, and to construct a model in our heads of the world around us.

Research has found that when we create visual imagery in our minds, both top-down and bottom-up processing is equally important to the process. According to Posner and Marcus (1997), bottom-up processing can be defined as those processes driven automatically by a person, over which we may have no control; Barinaga (1997) states that an example of this is the brain's involuntary mechanisms for resolving competition between conflicting interpretations of information it receives. Posner and Marcus define top-down processing as being those processes generated internally by the person, Barinaga (1997) states that an example of this is someone making the choice to focus their attention on searching for a yellow book on a shelf. To understand more fully how the combined contributions of both top-down processing and bottom-up processing interact, Grabowecky, Robertson and Treisman (1993) conducted an experiment into how people can effectively search for a specific chosen visual target!
amongst an array of other visual stimuluses (the distracters). This exercise resembled the task of one looking for a familiar face in a photograph of a crowd. In this particular experiment the crowd was resembled using a combination of blu...