Pool of Essay Questions

Chapter 3

1. Describe the a) law of good continuation, b) law of similarity, c) law of proximity, and d) law of common fate. e) How does a moving light display illustrate the common fate principle?

2. Describe some experimental evidence used to argue for top-down processes in perceptual segregation.

3. A) Geisler et al. (2001) took a series of images of natural scenes and made what kinds of measurements on these images? B) What were their findings when these measurements were related to information about objects in natural scenes? C) What was the implication of this study?

4. What are some commonalities between Marr’s theory of object recognition and Biederman’s theory of recognition by components?

5. Why are template matching theories not powerful enough as general theories of object recognition?

6. A) What are some non-accidental properties of geons in Biederman’s theory of recognition-by-components? B) According to Biederman, why are regions of concavity important in object recognition? C) How does Biederman’s theory propose to address the binding problem?

7. Describe the object recognition experiment with degraded line drawing by Biederman (1987). A) what were the two conditions? B) what were the findings?

8. A) Describe the Greeble study by Gauthier and Tarr (2002). B) What were the findings? C) What are the implications of these findings for the recognition-by- components theory?

9. A) What is the difference between apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia? B) How does the model by Riddoch and Humphreys (2001) explain the different agnosias?

10. A) What were the different conditions used in the Farah (1994) study with faces and houses? B) What were the findings and implications of this study?

11. A) What evidence is used to argue that face recognition is special? B) What evidence is used to argue that face recognition is not special?

12. A) In Shepard’s letter and object rotation studies, what were the main findings? B) What implications do Shepard’s mental rotation studies have for the study of visual imagery? 13. A) Describe Kosslyn’s perceptual anticipation theory. B) What evidence has been used to argue for this theory?

14. Describe the experiment by Finke and Kosslyn (1980) on measuring the horizontal and vertical fields of resolution in perception and imagery. A) What were the independent variables? B) What were the findings? C) What implications do these findings have?