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The Stuff of Thought
The idea that shapes can be cognitively melted down into schematic blobs skewered on axes originally came from a theory of shape recognition by the computational neuroscientist David Marr. Marr noted how easily people recognize stick figures and animals made from pipe cleaners or twisted balloons, despite their dissimilarity from real objects in their arrangement of pixels. He proposed that we actually represent shapes in the mind in blog-and-axis models rather than in raw images, because such a model is stable as the object moves relative to the viewer.
Yes indeed, Steven Pinker has a new book out.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 14, 2007 at 02:11 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
"Blog-and-axis models"? Did you mean "blob-and-axis"?
Posted by: Aaron at Sep 14, 2007 2:52:46 AM
I'm sure we *can* represent objects that way and that some people prefer to do so, but that hardly means everyone does. You can use the computer as a metaphor, but beware confusing a given metaphor with its ground. The psychologist fallacy abounds in talk about the mind at this level.
Posted by: John Goes at Sep 14, 2007 3:53:23 AM
This theory is based on research, for example if you time how fast people can recognize objects, they all can quickly recognize an object that has been translated, scale-changed, mirror-imaged. There is a small delay for rotation in depth.
However humans display a monotonically increasing delay in recognizing objects rotated in the visual plane, being least at 0 degrees and maximal at 135 degrees, decreasing slightly at 180 degrees.
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