Right for the wrong reason; wrong for the right reason: Gibson and Arnheim on picture perception

Although J J Gibson’s theory of picture perception was often crude and biased toward naturalism, its fundamental division between the visual world and the visual field made it a semiotic theory. Contrariwise, although Arnheim wrote sensitively on pictures, he never seemed to admit that they were signs. This paper reviews both Gibson’s and Arnheim’s theories of picture perception, and explains where Arnheim’s biases caused him to lose the possibility of framing his approach in the most basic semiotic terms. Nevertheless, using the phenomenological semiotics of Sonesson and his theory of the Lifeworld Hierarchy, I demonstrate latent semiotic elements in Arnheim’s theory, due perhaps to Alfred Schutz’s influence. Hoping to argue against the brute theory of denotation, Arnheim instead sought to delay invocation of (conventional) signs as long as possible, and his idea of iconic pictorialization assumes but does not name signification. Nevertheless, I propose that Arnheim has a kind of theory of the Lifeworld Hierarchy inside the picture. Thus, he (wrongly) does not see the picture as overtly signifying but interestingly gives hints about how to treat the objects of the virtual world of the picture based on their relationship to the overall style of the work.

Hybrid Approach for Detection of Objects from Images Using Fisher Vector and PSO Based CNN

Owing to the near connection between object recognition and video processing and picture perception, a lot of research interest has been received in recent years. Standard methods of object detection are focused on manufactured technologies and slow-moving architectures. Fisher Vectors (FV) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are two picture arrangement pipelines with various qualities. While CNNs have indicated predominant exactness on various order assignments, FV classifiers are normally less exorbitant to prepare and assess. In this paper we propose a mechanism for detection of objects in image based on Fisher kernel and CNN with a PSO optimization technique. Here fisher kernel draws the global or statically features from the image object and CNN is used for local and more complex feature extraction from an image and here we use CNN with PSO to reduce the training complexity. Performance results shows that the proposed model is detect the object better than the existing models.

Motoric Understanding and Aesthetic Appreciation

Standard philosophical studies on picture perception usually investigated the peculiar nature of pictorial experience and the way aesthetic appreciation can be generated during this experience. Recently, however, the philosophical literature has also focused on a new aspect of picture perception: the possible involvement that the visual states related to action processing may actually play in pictorial experience. But this role has been studied only in relation to the understanding of the nature of pictorial experience, qua visual experience. This paper offers some preliminar speculation, which may guide future research, on the role of action in aesthetic appreciation of pictures.

The Epistemic Role of Core Cognition

According to a traditional picture, perception and belief have starkly different epistemic roles. Beliefs have epistemic statuses as justified or unjustified, depending on how they are formed and maintained. In contrast, perceptions are “unjustified justifiers.” Core cognition is a set of mental systems that stand at the border of perception and belief, and has been extensively studied in developmental psychology. Core cognition's borderline states do not fit neatly into the traditional epistemic picture. What is the epistemic role of these states? Focusing on the core object system, the author argues that core object representations have epistemic statuses like beliefs do, despite their many prototypically perceptual features. First, the author argues that it is a sufficient condition on a mental state's having an epistemic status as justified or unjustified that the state is based on reasons. Then the author argues that core object representations are based on reasons, through an examination of both experimental results and key markers of the basing relation. The scope of mental states that are subject to epistemic evaluation as justified or unjustified is not restricted to beliefs.

Effects of Chinese word structure on object perception in Chinese–English bilinguals: Evidence from an ERP visual oddball paradigm

Lupyan's (2012) label-feedback hypothesis proposes that linguistic labels affect our conceptual and perceptual representations through top-down feedback. We investigated whether such representations in bilinguals are influenced by labels from both of their languages by examining the effect of Chinese word structure on picture perception in Chinese–English bilinguals. A visual-oddball task with ERP was used. Pictures of four birds were used as standards and deviants. The robin-ostrich pair shared a category cue in their Chinese names (like blackbird in English), and the pigeon-penguin pair did not. In Chinese–English bilinguals who were new to Canada, the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) elicited by deviant stimuli was significantly larger for pairs without category cues than pairs with cues, but, in long-stay bilinguals and English monolinguals, the vMMN was similar for the two pairs. These results demonstrate that object perception is influenced by the labels in both of a bilingual's languages.

Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm

Painting, drawings, and engravings are frequently described as rhythmic, or as possessing rhythmic features, but it is far from clear how such observations are to be understood. The central problem here is that rhythm is standardly recognized to be an inherently temporal phenomenon: rhythmic structure or organization unfolds in time. If rhythm is essentially durational, how can a static configuration of marks and lines be rhythmic? Chapter 19 defends the view that although the experience of viewing a picture takes place in time, and thus is successive, it cannot be temporally structured in a sufficiently determinate manner to sustain the attentional focus required for the communication of even simple rhythmic patterns. With reference to examples of both representational and abstract art, and to recent empirical research, the author argues that graphic art is non-sequential and that this has important consequences for picture perception.

Picture perception reveals mental geometry of 3D scene inferences

Pose estimation of objects in real scenes is critically important for biological and machine visual systems, but little is known of how humans infer 3D poses from 2D retinal images. We show unexpectedly remarkable agreement in the 3D poses different observers estimate from pictures. We further show that all observers apply the same inferential rule from all viewpoints, utilizing the geometrically derived back-transform from retinal images to actual 3D scenes. Pose estimations are altered by a fronto-parallel bias, and by image distortions that appear to tilt the ground plane. We used pictures of single sticks or pairs of joined sticks taken from different camera angles. Observers viewed these from five directions, and matched the perceived pose of each stick by rotating an arrow on a horizontal touchscreen. The projection of each 3D stick to the 2D picture, and then onto the retina, is described by an invertible trigonometric expression. The inverted expression yields the back-projection for each object pose, camera elevation, and observer viewpoint. We show that a model that uses the back-projection, modulated by just two free parameters, explains 560 pose estimates per observer. By considering changes in retinal image orientations due to position and elevation of limbs, the model also explains perceived limb poses in a complex scene of two bodies lying on the ground. The inferential rules simply explain both perceptual invariance and dramatic distortions in poses of real and pictured objects, and show the benefits of incorporating projective geometry of light into mental inferences about 3D scenes.