Visual Indexing Theory
Visual indexing theory, also known as FINST theory, is a theory of early visual perception developed by Zenon Pylyshyn in the 1980s. It proposes a pre-attentive mechanism (a ‘FINST’) whose function is to individuate salient elements of a visual scene, and track their locations across space and time. Developed in response to what Pylyshyn viewed as limitations of prominent theories of visual perception at the time, visual indexing theory is supported by several lines of empirical evidence. Overview Fingers of instantiation 'FINST' abbreviates ‘FINgers of INSTantiation’. Pylyshyn describes visual indexing theory in terms of this analogy.Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1989). The role of location indexes in spatial perception: a sketch of the FINST spatial index model. Cognition, 32, 65–97. Imagine, he proposes, placing your fingers on five separate objects in a scene. As those objects move about, your fingers stay in respective contact with each of them, allowing you to continual ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Visual Perception
Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision (daytime vision), color vision, scotopic vision (night vision), and mesopic vision (twilight vision), using light in the visible spectrum reflected by objects in the environment. This is different from visual acuity, which refers to how clearly a person sees (for example "20/20 vision"). A person can have problems with visual perceptual processing even if they have 20/20 vision. The resulting perception is also known as vision, sight, or eyesight (adjectives ''visual'', ''optical'', and ''ocular'', respectively). The various physiological components involved in vision are referred to collectively as the visual system, and are the focus of much research in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and molecular biology, collectively referred to as vision science. Visual system In humans and a number of other mammals, light enters the eye through the corne ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Zenon Pylyshyn
Zenon Walter Pylyshyn (; 25 August 1937–6 December 2022) was a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964. Pylyshyn's research generally involved the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He also continued to develop his visual indexing theory (sometimes called the FINST theory) which hypothesizes a preconceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly (or demonstratively) referring to the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes. Early life and education Pylyshyn was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He obtained a degree in Engineering Physics (BEng 1959) from McGill University and in control systems (MSc 1960) and experimental psychology (PhD 1963), both from the Regina Campus, University of Saskatchewan. His dissertation was on the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pre-attentive Processing
Pre-attentive processing is the subconscious accumulation of information from the environment.Atienza, M., Cantero, J. L., & Escera, C. (2001). Auditory information processing during human sleep as revealed by event-related brain potentials. Clinical Neurophysiology, 112(11), 2031-2045.Van der Heijden, A. H. C. (1996). Perception for selection, selection for action, and action for perception. Visual Cognition, 3(4), 357-361. All available information is pre-attentively processed. Then, the brain filters and processes what is important. Information that has the highest salience (a stimulus that stands out the most) or relevance to what a person is thinking about is selected for further and more complete analysis by conscious (attentive) processing. Understanding how pre-attentive processing works is useful in advertising, in education, and for prediction of cognitive ability. Pure-capture and contingent-capture The reasons are unclear as to why certain information proceeds from ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Attention
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence." Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in terms of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, only less than 1% of the visual input data (at around one megabyte per second) can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness. Attention remains a crucial area of investigation within education, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsycho ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mental Representation
A mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that makes use of such a symbol: "a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types of information, together with a specification of how the system does this". Mental representation is the mental imagery of things that are not actually present to the senses. In contemporary philosophy, specifically in fields of metaphysics such as philosophy of mind and ontology, a mental representation is one of the prevailing ways of explaining and describing the nature of ideas and concepts. Mental representations (or mental imagery) enable representing things that have never been experienced as well as things that do not exist. Think of yourself traveling to a place you have never visited before, or having a third arm. These things have eithe ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Subitizing
Subitizing is the rapid, accurate, and confident judgments of numbers performed for small numbers of items. The term was coined in 1949 by E. L. Kaufman et al., and is derived from the Latin adjective '' subitus'' (meaning "sudden") and captures a feeling of immediately knowing how many items lie within the visual scene, when the number of items present falls within the subitizing range. Sets larger than about four items cannot be subitized unless the items appear in a pattern with which the person is familiar (such as the six dots on one face of a die). Large, familiar sets might be counted one-by-one (or the person might calculate the number through a rapid calculation if they can mentally group the elements into a few small sets). A person could also estimate the number of a large set—a skill similar to, but different from, subitizing. The accuracy, speed, and confidence with which observers make judgments of the number of items are critically dependent on the number of ele ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Visual Search
Visual search is a type of perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the visual environment for a particular object or feature (the target) among other objects or features (the distractors). Visual search can take place with or without eye movements. The ability to consciously locate an object or target amongst a complex array of stimuli has been extensively studied over the past 40 years. Practical examples of using visual search can be seen in everyday life, such as when one is picking out a product on a supermarket shelf, when animals are searching for food among piles of leaves, when trying to find a friend in a large crowd of people, or simply when playing visual search games such as ''Where's Wally?'' Much previous literature on visual search used reaction time in order to measure the time it takes to detect the target amongst its distractors. An example of this could be a green square (the target) amongst a set of red circles (the distract ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sparse Distributed Memory
Sparse distributed memory (SDM) is a mathematical model of human long-term memory introduced by Pentti Kanerva in 1988 while he was at NASA Ames Research Center. It is a generalized random-access memory (RAM) for long (e.g., 1,000 bit) binary words. These words serve as both addresses to and data for the memory. The main attribute of the memory is sensitivity to similarity, meaning that a word can be read back not only by giving the original write address but also by giving one close to it, as measured by the number of mismatched bits (i.e., the Hamming distance between memory addresses). SDM implements transformation from logical space to physical space using distributed data representation and storage, similarly to encoding processes in human memory. A value corresponding to a logical address is stored into many physical addresses. This way of storing is robust and not deterministic. A memory cell is not addressed directly. If input data (logical addresses) are partially damaged a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Visual Perception
Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision (daytime vision), color vision, scotopic vision (night vision), and mesopic vision (twilight vision), using light in the visible spectrum reflected by objects in the environment. This is different from visual acuity, which refers to how clearly a person sees (for example "20/20 vision"). A person can have problems with visual perceptual processing even if they have 20/20 vision. The resulting perception is also known as vision, sight, or eyesight (adjectives ''visual'', ''optical'', and ''ocular'', respectively). The various physiological components involved in vision are referred to collectively as the visual system, and are the focus of much research in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and molecular biology, collectively referred to as vision science. Visual system In humans and a number of other mammals, light enters the eye through the corne ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |