Description

Chaz Firestone is Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory. His research explores how perception -- our means of contact with the external world -- interacts with the rest of the mind. A primary focus of research in the lab has been how perception enables and even incorporates seemingly sophisticated processing of the sort typically associated with higher-level cognition. For example, the lab has recently explored how our minds generate physical intuitions about the world (e.g., how we come to understand that a tower of blocks will topple or a stack of dishes will collapse), and how such intuitions may be underwritten by more basic operations of visual attention and memory. The lab also has interests in long-standing foundational questions about the nature of perception, including how higher-level cognitive factors such as language, desire, emotion, and action can (and cannot) influence what we see. In addition to computer-based psychophysics experiments, the lab has approached these questions using larger real-world environments, computational models, 3D-printed stimuli, studies of brain-damaged patients, and even some unusual 'field work' (including recent experiments run in New York City's Times Square!).

Abstract:

What is perception? The most intuitive and influential answer to this question has long been the one given by David Marr: To see the world is “to know what is where by looking” — to transform light into representations of objects and their features, located somewhere in space. But is this all that perception delivers? Consider the figure to the right; certainly you see some colored shapes, as well as where they are located. Yet, beyond this, you may also see how they relate to one another: The green piece can fit into the others, and even create a new object with a shape of its own.

In this talk, I present evidence that perception extracts relations between objects in much the same way as it processes the objects themselves, and that these relations are abstract, structured, and surprisingly sophisticated. We’ll explore (and experience) the perception of several sophisticated relations between objects, including combining, supporting, containing, covering, and fastening — as well as relational “illusions” in which objects appear to interact with mysteriously invisible entities. Together, this work suggests that we see not only “what” and “where”, but also “how”.

This lecture will take place at 3:30 pm in Psychology 1312 on the UCSB campus and is free and open to the public.