Chapter 05 Perceiving Objects and Scenes

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Chapter 05 Perceiving Objects and Scenes

1. Current computer programs can identify some objects
a. and require only brief “training” on a few images.
b. and are considered remarkably successful.
c. but they perform only slightly above chance.
d. but they often make errors that a human would never make.
ANSWER: d
2. Which problem shows that numerous physical stimuli can create the same image on the retina
a. Correspondence
b. Inverse projection
c. Occlusion
d. Ambiguity
ANSWER: b
3. Jimmy looks at a moderately blurred picture of Princess Diana’s face. Jimmy will most likely
a. not be able to identify the face.
b. identify the face as male rather than female.
c. be able to correctly identify the face.
d. need a computer to scan the image to correctly identify it.
ANSWER: c
4. Viewpoint invariance” means that

a. children can only represent one perceptual viewpoint at a time.
b. computers can invert images to easily perform object recognition.
c. humans can easily recognize objects when seen from different viewpoints.
d. monkeys can only recognize other monkey faces from a frontal view.
ANSWER: c
5. Wundt and Wertheimer, respectively, are known for

a. structuralism and Gestalt psychology.
b. Gestalt psychology and functionalism.
c. functionalism and structuralism.
d. psychophysics and metaphysics.
ANSWER: a
6. Structuralists would be most likely to endorse which of the following statements?

a. Sensations and perceptions are the same “unit” of thought.
b. The whole of something is greater than its parts.
c. The starting point for perceptions is the sensations that make them up.
d. Past experience plays little or no role in perception formation.
ANSWER: c
7. The demonstration of apparent movement provides support for the Gestalt approach because
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a. the phenomenon cannot be explained by sensations alone.

b. the phenomenon relies exclusively on the perceiver’s past experience.
c. the images used do not follow the principle of common region.
d. the phenomenon relied on figure/ground segregation.
ANSWER: a
8. Gestalt psychologists used the example of illusory contours to support the claim that
a. perceptions are formed by combining sensations.
b. vision can be modeled on computer processing.
c. the whole is different than the sum of its parts.
d. experience determines perceptual interpretation.
ANSWER: c
9. The Olympic symbol is an example of the Gestalt principle of

a. proximity.
b. pragnanz.
c. common fate.
d. synchrony.
ANSWER: b
10. Which principle can account for the grouping of stimuli that share orientation, shape, and/or size?
a. Segregation
b. Shape
c. Identity
d. Similarity
ANSWER: d
11. Corey looks at a flock of seagulls flying in one direction, when suddenly, five of the seagulls start flying in another
direction. He now perceives two groups of birds because of the Gestalt principle of
a. common fate.
b. uniform connectedness.
c. synchrony.
d. pragnanz.
ANSWER: a
12. Alyson looks at a picture of arrows and sees white arrows pointing to the right against a black background. She looks
at the picture longer and then sees black arrows pointing to the left against a white background. Her perception of this
stimulus is an example of
a. perceptual segregation.
b. binocular rivalry.
c. view invariance.
d. orientation invariance.
ANSWER: a

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13. In a scene, the objects in the foreground are best described with the term
a. object.
b. ground.
c. near point.
d. figure.
ANSWER: d
14. Border ownership means that when figure-ground segregation occurs, the border between the figure and background
a. seems to change color.
b. is perceived to be associated with the background.
c. is perceived to be associated with the figure.
d. seems to disappear.
ANSWER: c
15. Which of the following is a general determinant of figure-ground segregation?

a. The right side is more likely to be perceived as a figure than the left.
b. Small stimuli are more likely to be perceived as ground than a figure.
c. Near the shared borders, the figure is seen as unformed material.
d. A lower region is more likely to be perceived as a figure than an upper region.
ANSWER: d
16. Sally recently looked at some visual illusions. In one reversible-image illusion, she saw a vase in the middle of a blue
box. What is Sally most likely to remember about this illusion?
a. Details about the box
b. The two faces on the side of the face
c. The vase she saw in the illusion
d. The lower half of the image
ANSWER: c
17. In one reversible figure/ground study, Gibson and Peterson (1994) used an image, in which one area looks like a
woman when upright but does not resemble anything when turned upside down. Their general finding was that
a. the meaningfulness of an image had a large effect on figure-ground segregation.
b. meaningful images were just as likely to be seen as figures or ground.
c. inverting the entire image led to slower response times.
d. meaningfulness only had an effect when they appeared on the left side.
ANSWER: a
18. The Bev Doolittle print of “The Forest Has Eyes” exemplifies what principle affecting perceptual organization?
a. Proximity
b. Common region
c. Meaningfulness
d. Common fate
ANSWER: c

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19. Humans need approximately how long to perceive the gist of a scene?
a. 250 milliseconds
b. 1000 milliseconds
c. 2 seconds
d. 5 seconds
ANSWER: a
20. A masking stimulus is primarily used to

a. stop persistence of vision.
b. increase the duration of persistence of vision.
c. increase the area of the “region-of-interest.”
d. hide the purpose of the experiment from participants.
ANSWER: a
21. Based on Fei-Fei et al. (2007), smaller objects within a scene are typically recognized within
a. 50 milliseconds.
b. 150 milliseconds.
c. 500 milliseconds.
d. 1000 milliseconds.
ANSWER: c
22. Global image features are

a. individualistic.
b. slowly perceived.
c. slowly processed.
d. holistic.
ANSWER: d
23. Suppose you were to review dozens of photographs of various natural and man-made scenes on social media. You
would expect that
a. horizontal and vertical orientations would be most common.
b. diagonal orientations would be most common.
c. the major environmental regularities would be incompatible with Gestalt principals.
d. environmental irregularities would be more salient than environmental regularities.
ANSWER: a
24. What is the term for the effect in which humans perceive horizontals and verticals more easily than other orientations?
a. Turing
b. Oblique
c. Spreading
d. Visual persistence
ANSWER: b

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25. Jimmy looks at a picture of a side of a submarine that has dents and bumps on it. When he turns the picture upside-
down, what he originally perceived as bumps now look like dents and vice versa. This is due to
a. figure-ground reversal.
b. the oblique effect.
c. accidental properties of light.
d. the “light-from-above” assumption.
ANSWER: d
26. What do humans use to distinguish shape from shading?

a. Environmental assumption
b. Light-from-above assumption
c. Proximity principle
d. Delayed-matching principle
ANSWER: b
27. When Palmer (1975) showed observers a kitchen scene and then a target picture, which picture was identified
correctly 80% of the time?
a. A loaf of bread because it matches the context of the scene
b. A mailbox because it seems so out-of-context that it “pops out”
c. A drum because participants were music majors
d. A bedroom because it is from the same category
ANSWER: a
28. The theory of unconscious inference

a. replaced the Bayesian inference approach.
b. is closely related to the “likelihood principle.”
c. describes the use of algorithms in perception.
d. is incompatible with Gestalt psychology.
ANSWER: b
29. If two eyes receive totally different images and the brain can’t combine the two images, what condition called results?
a. Delayed processing
b. Persistence of vision
c. Binocular rivalry
d. Visual masking
ANSWER: c
30. Which type of object, when seen or imagined in isolation, evokes a strong sense of surrounding space?
a. Idiosyncratic
b. Spatially-bound
c. Characteristic
d. Space defining
ANSWER: d

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31. Tong, et al. (1998) used binocular rivalry to test brain responses when the person perceived a house or a face. When
the person perceived the house, activity in the
a. PPA increased, but not in the FFA.
b. FFA increased, but not in PPA.
c. PPA and the FFA increased.
d. PPA and the FFA decreased.
ANSWER: a
32. A voxel is
a. a small cube-shaped area of the brain about 2 mm on each side.
b. an electrode used to measure brain activity.
c. the basic unit of sensation.
d. the retinal area on which an image is projected.
ANSWER: a
33. Kamitani and Tong (2005) developed “orientation decoders.” When eight orientations were tested, the decoders were
able to correctly predict what orientation a person was looking at for how many of the eight gratings?
a. Two
b. Four
c. Six
d. Eight
ANSWER: d
34. Naselaris, et al. (2009) developed what type of decoder, which is used to make predictions about the characteristics of
a scene, such as contrast and shape?
a. Form
b. Structural
c. Orientation
d. Semantic
ANSWER: b
35. What type of decoder is intended to discriminate between different categories of images, such as outdoor scenes and
portraits?
a. Orientation
b. Structure
c. Scene
d. Semantic
ANSWER: d
36. Which of the following is true regarding inversion effects?

a. Faces and other objects are equally affected by inversion.
b. Face processing is slowed more than that of other objects.
c. Object identification is not affected by inversion.
d. They demonstrate that faces are processed by feature.
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ANSWER: b
37. Perceiving the emotional aspects of a face is reflected by activation in the brain structure called the
a. amygdala.
b. medulla.
c. IT cortex.
d. superior temporal sulcus.
ANSWER: a
38. The preferential looking technique showed that infants as young as what age will look at their mother’s face more than
a stranger’s face?
a. Two-days-old
b. One-week-old
c. One-month-old
d. Six-months-old
ANSWER: a
39. Research has shown that an infant can visually recognize their mother’s face from
a. the contrast between her eye color and face.
b. her smile.
c. the contrast between her hairline and forehead.
d. her overall head shape.
ANSWER: c
40. The ability to recognize faces, including identifying expressions, is not fully developed until approximately
a. late infancy.
b. early childhood.
c. late childhood.
d. adolescence or early adulthood.
ANSWER: d
41. Discuss three reasons why object perception is difficult for computer vision.
ANSWER: The stimulus on the receptor can be ambiguous.
Objects can be hidden or blurred.
Objects look different from different viewpoints.
42. State, define, and give an example (in words and/or drawings) for each of five Gestalt principles of perceptual
organization.
ANSWER: The principle of good continuation states the following: Points that, when connected, result in straight or
smoothly curving lines are seen as belonging together, and the lines tend to be seen in such a way as to
follow the smoothest path.
The principle of pragnanz, also called the principle of good figure or the principle of simplicity, states:
Every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible.
According to the principle of similarity, similar things appear to be grouped together.
According to the principle of proximity, or nearness, things that are near each other appear to be grouped
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together.
According to the principle of common fate, things that are moving in the same direction appear to be
grouped together.
According to the principle of common region, elements that are within the same region of space appear to
be grouped together.
According to the principle of uniform connectedness, a connected region of the same visual properties,
such as lightness, color, texture, or motion, is perceived as a single unit.
43. Describe two image-based factors that determine what area is seen as a “figure” in an image with a reversible figure-
ground. Draw an example that demonstrates each factor.
ANSWER: One image-based factor proposed by the Gestalt psychologists was that areas lower in the field of view are
more likely to be perceived as figures. Another Gestalt proposal was that figures are more likely to be
perceived on the convex side of borders
44. Name and describe five “global image features.”

ANSWER: Degree of naturalness. Natural scenes have textured zones and undulating contours. Man-made scenes,
such as the street, are dominated by straight lines, horizontals, and verticals.
Degree of openness. Open scenes, such as the ocean, often have a visible horizon line and contain few
objects. The street scene is also open, although not as much as the ocean scene. The forest is an example of
a scene with a low degree of openness.
Degree of roughness. Smooth scenes (low roughness) like the ocean contain fewer small elements. Scenes
with high roughness like the forest contain many small elements and are more complex.
Degree of expansion. The convergence of parallel lines, like what you see when you look down railroad
tracks that appear to vanish in the distance, indicates a high degree of expansion. This feature is especially
dependent on the observer’s viewpoint.
Color. Some scenes have characteristic colors, like the ocean scene (blue) and the forest (green and brown).
45. Describe the main finding from binocular rivalry research and explain why that finding is important.
ANSWER: Observers in Tong, et al.’s (1998) experiment viewed the overlapping red house and green face through
red-green glasses, so the house image was presented to the right eye and the face image to the left eye.
Because of binocular rivalry, the observers’ perception alternated back and forth between the face and the
house. When the observers perceived the house, activity occurred in the parahippocampal place area (PPA)
in the left and right hemispheres (red ellipses). When observers perceived the face, activity occurred in the
fusiform face area (FFA) in the left hemisphere (green ellipse). This experiment and others like it generated
a great deal of excitement among brain researchers because they measured brain activation and perception
simultaneously and demonstrated a dynamic relationship between perception and brain activity in which
changes in perception and changes in brain activity mirrored each other.
46. Define semantic regularities and describe their effect on perceptual organization.
ANSWER: In language, semantics refers to the meanings of words or sentences. When applied to perceiving scenes,
semantics refers to the meaning of a scene. This meaning is often related to what happens within a scene.
For example, food preparation, cooking, and perhaps eating occur in a kitchen; waiting around, buying
tickets, checking luggage, and going through security checkpoints happen in airports. Semantic regularities
are the characteristics associated with activities that are common in different types of scenes.
Most people who have grown up in modern society have little trouble visualizing an office or the clothing
section of a department store. What is important about this ability, for our purposes, is that part of this
visualization involves details within these scenes. Most people see an office as having a desk with a
computer on it, bookshelves, and a chair. The department store scene may contain racks of clothes, a
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changing room, and perhaps a cash register. Our visualizations contain information based on our
knowledge of different kinds of scenes. This knowledge of what a given scene typically contains is called a
scene schema.
47. Describe how Bayesian inference can be used to understand perception.

ANSWER: Bayesian inference was named after Thomas Bayes (1701–1761), who proposed that our estimate of the
probability of an outcome is determined by two factors: (1) the prior probability, or simply the prior, which
is our initial estimate of the probability of an outcome, and (2) the extent to which the available evidence is
consistent with the outcome. This second factor is called the likelihood of the outcome.
Applying this idea to object perception, let’s return to the inverse projection problem. Remember that the
inverse projection problem occurs because a huge number of possible objects could be associated with a
particular image on the retina. Thus, the problem is how to determine what is “out there” that is causing a
particular retinal image. Luckily, we don’t have to rely only on the retinal image because we come to most
perceptual situations with prior probabilities based on our past experiences.
One of the priors you have in your head is that books are rectangular. Thus, when you look at a book on
your desk, your initial belief is that it is likely that the book is rectangular. The likelihood that the book is
rectangular is provided by additional evidence, such as the book’s retinal image, combined with your
perception of the book’s distance and the angle at which you are viewing the book. If this additional
evidence is consistent with your prior that the book is rectangular, the likelihood is high, and the perception
“rectangular” is strengthened. Further testing by changing your viewing angle and distance can further
strengthen the conclusion that the shape is a rectangle. Note that you aren’t necessarily conscious of this
testing process - it occurs automatically and rapidly. The important point about this process is that while the
retinal image is still the starting point for perceiving the shape of the book, adding the person’s prior beliefs
reduces the possible shapes that could be causing that image.
48. Describe the decoders developed by Naselaris, et al. (2009), how they were established, and what they can be used for.
ANSWER: Thomas Naselaris and coworkers (2009) created a brain reading device by developing two methods for
analyzing the patterns of voxel activation recorded from visual areas of an observer’s brain. The first
method, called structural encoding, is based on the relationship between voxel activation and structural
characteristics of a scene, such as lines, contrasts, shapes, and textures. Naselaris’s structural decoder was
calibrated by presenting a large number of images and determining how voxels responded to specific
features of each scene, such as line orientation, detail, and the position of the image. These data were used
to calibrate the structural encoder so it could use patterns of voxel responses to predict the features of the
image that the subject was viewing. The second method for analyzing patterns of voxel activation, called
semantic encoding, is based on the relationship between voxel activation and the meaning or category of a
scene. The semantic encoder is calibrated by measuring the pattern of voxel activation to a large number of
images that have previously been classified into categories such as “crowd,” “portrait,” “vehicle,” and
“outdoor.” From this calibration, the relationship between the pattern of voxel activation and image
category is determined. This semantic decoder then uses the pattern of voxel responses to make predictions
about the type of scene the subject is viewing.
49. Explain how grouping and segregation work together to organize perception.
ANSWER: Perceptual organization is the process by which elements in the environment become perceptually grouped
to create our perception of objects. During this process, incoming stimulation is organized into coherent
units such as objects. The process of perceptual organization involves two components: grouping and
segregation. Grouping is the process by which visual events are “put together” into units or objects. The
process of grouping works in conjunction with segregation, which is the process of separating one area or
object from another. Thus, seeing two buildings as separate from one another, with borders indicating
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where one building ends and the other begins, involves segregation.
50. Describe what is known about the ability of infants to perceive human faces.
ANSWER: Human faces are among the most important stimuli in an infant’s environment. As a newborn or young
infant stares up from the crib, numerous faces of interested adults appear in the infant’s ﬁeld of view. The
face that the infant sees most frequently is usually its mother’s, and there is evidence that young infants can
recognize their mother’s face shortly after they are born. Using preferential looking in which 2-day-old
infants were given a choice between their mother’s face and a stranger’s, Ian Bushnell and coworkers
(1989) found that newborns looked at their mother about 63 percent of the time. This result is above the 50
percent chance level, so Bushnell concluded that the 2-day-olds could recognize their mother’s face. To
determine what information the infants might be using to recognize their mother’s faces, Olivier Pascalis
and coworkers (1995) showed that when the mother and the stranger wore pink scarves that covered their
hairline, the preference for the mother disappeared. The high-contrast border between the mother’s dark
hairline and light forehead apparently provided important information about the mother’s physical
characteristics that infants use to recognize the mother.
There is also evidence for the role of experience in infant face perception. Ian Bushnell (2001) observed
newborns over the ﬁrst 3 days of life to determine whether there was a relationship between their looking
behavior and the amount of time they were with their mother. He found that, at 3 days of age, when the
infants were given a choice between looking at a stranger’s face or their mother’s face, the infants who had
been exposed to their mother longer were more likely to prefer her over the stranger. The two infants with
the lowest exposure to their mother (an average of 1.5 hours) divided their looking evenly between the
mother and stranger, but the two infants with the longest exposure (an average of 7.5 hours) looked at their
mother 68 percent of the time. Analyzing the results from all of the infants led Bushnell to conclude that
face perception emerges very rapidly after birth, but that experience in looking at faces does have an effect.
Although the infant’s ability to recognize faces develops rapidly over the first few months, these impressive
gains are only a starting point because even though 3- to 4-month-old infants can recognize some facial
expressions, their ability to identify faces does not reach adult levels until adolescence or early adulthood.

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