PSY 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 29: Mental Representation, Visual Cortex, Visual Search
Document Summary
Would have to store impossible number of templates, we can easily recognize new objects, we can recognize patterns as being more or less the same thing even when their stimulus patterns differ greatly. Objects are mentally represented as list of feautures, the features of perceived objects are compared to these stored features. Study for this is the visual search for target letters among distractors. Two jumbled up series of words, asked to spot the letter z, however, one set of words is much easier to find the z than the other, even though they are both nonsense words. Cats cortical cells can"t respond to the horizontal line stimulus at all, however, when the line gets to near vertical, the cortical cell exhibits a partial response, and when it gets to the vertical line, gets a strong response. Structural relationships among features are often as important as the features themselves.
