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Shape Understanding: On the Perception of Growth, Form and Process| old_uid | 15559 |
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| title | Shape Understanding: On the Perception of Growth, Form and Process |
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| start_date | 2015/04/27 |
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| schedule | 11h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Whenever we look at an object, we can effortlessly infer many of its physical and functional properties from its shape and our previous experience with other objects. We can judge whether it is flexible or fragile; stable or likely to tumble; what might have happened to it in the past (e.g. a crushed can or bitten apple); and can even imagine how other members of the same object class might look. In this talk, I will suggests that these high-level inferences are evidence of sophisticated visual and cognitive processes that derive behaviourally significant information about objects from their 3D shape—a process I call ‘Shape Understanding’. Despite its obvious importance to everyday life, surprisingly little is known about how the brain uses shape to infer other properties of objects including their origins or typical behaviour. I will use demos and a smattering of experimental evidence to argue that when we view novel objects, the brain uses perceptual organization mechanisms to infer a primitive ‘generative model’ describing the processes that gave the shape its key characteristics. I will argue that such models facilitate us in many tasks related to shape and material perception, including: (a) identifying physical properties such as viscosity, elasticity or ductility; (b) predicting the object or material’s future states as it moves and interacts with other things; (c) judging similarity between different shapes and (d) predicting what other members of the same category might look like (‘plausible variants’), even when you’ve only seen one or a few exemplars. |
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| oncancel | séance annulée |
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| responsibles | Rämä, Izard |
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