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How The Brain Interprets Complex Visual Scenes Is An Enduring Mystery For Researchers
How The Brain Interprets Complex Visual Scenes Is An Enduring Mystery For Researchers
This
process occurs extremely rapidly - the "meaning" of a scene is interpreted within 1/20th of a
second, and, even though the information processed by the brain may be incomplete, the
interpretation is usually correct.
Occasionally, however, visual stimuli are open to interpretation. This is the case with
ambiguous figures - images which can be interpreted in more than one way. When an
ambiguous image is viewed, a single image impinges upon the retina, but higher order
processing in the visual cortex leads to a number of different interpretations of that image.
Only one of these interpretations is available to our conscious awareness at any one time.
Repeated viewing of the image leads to perceptual reversal, whereby first one, and then the
other, interpretation is perceived. For psychologists and neuroscientists, ambiguous
figures provide a means by which the functioning of the human visual system can be
investigated.
Salvador Dali's 1940 painting Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire(top) is
an example of an ambiguous figure. In this painting, the two nuns just left of centre can also
be perceived as the bust of the French writer and philosopher Voltaire. When looking at the
painting, our perception of the painting switches from one interpretation to the other.
In a study published in 2002, Lizann Bonnar, then at the University of Glasgow, and her
colleagues, investigated the stimuli which drive perception of the visual scene depicted in
Dali's painting. Participants were presented with a cropped greyscale version of the painting,
consisting solely of the area containing the nuns. A "bubble" filter was used to enhance or
obscure certain features of that part of the painting. They found that the participants
reported seeing the bust of Voltaire when the finer details of the painting were obscured, and
reported seeing the nuns when large scale features were obscured.
This experiment showed the importance of scale information in perception. The researchers
specifically manipulated the spatial resolution of the painting (that is, the periodicity with
which image intensity changes). Large scale features change little over a given distance, and
therefore have a low spatial resolution, while fine-grained features change much more over
the same distance, and so have a high spatial resolution.
In a second experiment, the participants were shown random noise patterns before the
cropped greyscale painting. One group was shown a pattern with a high spatial resolution,
the other a pattern with a low spatial resolution. Afterwards, the former reported seeing the
bust of Voltaire, while the latter reported seeing the nuns. This showed that previous
experience is an important factor in perception. The participants had selectively perceived
the frequency channels presented to them before they viewed the image.