scholarly journals Making it harder to 'see' meaning: The more you see something, the more its conceptual representation is susceptible to visual interference

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles P. Davis ◽  
Gitte H. Joergensen ◽  
Peter Boddy ◽  
Caitlin Dowling ◽  
Eiling Yee

Does the perceptual system for looking at the world overlap with the conceptual system for thinking about it? In two experiments (N = 403), we show that (1) when making simple semantic judgments on words, interference from a concurrent visual task scales in proportion to how much visual experience people have with the things the words refer to, and (2) when making the same judgments on the very same words, interference from a concurrent manual task scales in proportion to how much manual (but critically, not visual) experience people have with those same things. These results suggest that the meanings of frequently visually-experienced things are represented (in part) in the visual system used for actually seeing them, that this visually represented information is a functional part of conceptual knowledge, and that the extent of these visual representations is influenced by visual experience.

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 505-517
Author(s):  
Charles P. Davis ◽  
Gitte H. Joergensen ◽  
Peter Boddy ◽  
Caitlin Dowling ◽  
Eiling Yee

Does the perceptual system for looking at the world overlap with the conceptual system for thinking about it? We conducted two experiments ( N = 403) to investigate this question. Experiment 1 showed that when people make simple semantic judgments on words, interference from a concurrent visual task scales in proportion to how much visual experience they have with the things the words refer to. Experiment 2 showed that when people make the same judgments on the very same words, interference from a concurrent manual task scales in proportion to how much manual (but critically, not visual) experience people have with those same things. These results suggest that the meanings of frequently visually experienced things are represented (in part) in the visual system used for actually seeing them, that this visually represented information is a functional part of conceptual knowledge, and that the extent of these visual representations is influenced by visual experience.


Author(s):  
Anthea Roberts ◽  
Martti Koskenniemi

Is International Law International? takes the reader on a sweeping tour of the international legal academy to reveal some of the patterns of difference, dominance, and disruption that belie international law’s claim to universality. Both revealing and challenging, confronting and engaging, this book is a must-read for any international lawyer, particularly in a world of shifting geopolitical power. Pulling back the curtain on the “divisible college of international lawyers,” the author shows how international lawyers in different states, regions, and geopolitical groupings are often subject to differences in their incoming influences and outgoing spheres of influence in ways that affect how they understand and approach international law, including with respect to contemporary controversies like Crimea and the South China Sea. Using case studies and visual representations, the author demonstrates how actors and materials from some states and groups have come to dominate certain transnational flows and forums in ways that make them disproportionately influential in constructing the “international”—a point which holds true for Western actors, materials, and approaches in general, and Anglo-American ones in particular. But these patterns are set for disruption. As the world moves past an era of Western dominance and toward greater multipolarity, it is imperative for international lawyers to understand the perspectives of those coming from diverse backgrounds. By taking readers on a comparative tour of different international law academies and textbooks, the author encourages international lawyers to see the world through others’ eyes—an approach that is pressing in a world of rising nationalism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096372142199033
Author(s):  
Katherine R. Storrs ◽  
Roland W. Fleming

One of the deepest insights in neuroscience is that sensory encoding should take advantage of statistical regularities. Humans’ visual experience contains many redundancies: Scenes mostly stay the same from moment to moment, and nearby image locations usually have similar colors. A visual system that knows which regularities shape natural images can exploit them to encode scenes compactly or guess what will happen next. Although these principles have been appreciated for more than 60 years, until recently it has been possible to convert them into explicit models only for the earliest stages of visual processing. But recent advances in unsupervised deep learning have changed that. Neural networks can be taught to compress images or make predictions in space or time. In the process, they learn the statistical regularities that structure images, which in turn often reflect physical objects and processes in the outside world. The astonishing accomplishments of unsupervised deep learning reaffirm the importance of learning statistical regularities for sensory coding and provide a coherent framework for how knowledge of the outside world gets into visual cortex.


Leonardo ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 240-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Crandall ◽  
Noah Snavely

Social photo-sharing sites like Flickr contain vast amounts of latent information about the world and human behavior. The authors describe their recent work in building automatic algorithms that analyze large collections of imagery in order to extract some of this information. At a global scale, geo-tagged photographs can be used to identify the most photographed places on Earth, as well as to infer the names and visual representations of these places. At a local scale, the authors build detailed 3D models of a scene by combining information from thousands of 2D photographs taken by different people and from different vantage points.


2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 999-999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zenon W. Pylyshyn

The target article proposes that visual experience arises when sensorimotor contingencies are exploited in perception. This novel analysis of visual experience fares no better than the other proposals that the article rightly dismisses, and for the same reasons. Extracting invariants may be needed for recognition, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for having a visual experience. While the idea that vision involves the active extraction of sensorimotor invariants has merit, it does not replace the need for perceptual representations. Vision is not just for the immediate controlling of action; it is also for finding out about the world, from which inferences may be drawn and beliefs changed.


2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-409
Author(s):  
Daniela Merolla

AbstractSculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, and films have often refashioned narratives of the origins of the cosmos and of human beings. The essays collected in Creation Myths and the Visual Arts investigate the interplay between image and narrative and offer critical approaches from literary studies, the history of art, archaeology, and anthropology on the interpretation and categorization of verbal and visual representations of “creation myths” from all over the world.


2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 177-212
Author(s):  
Rachel Sutton-Spence ◽  
Ronice Müller de Quadros

In this paper, we consider the role of sign language poetry in creating and expressing the Deaf poet’s identity as a “visual person” in a community living within a wider national community. We show how two Deaf poets from different linguistic, national and cultural backgrounds nevertheless have both created similar effects through their sign language poems, drawing on the folkloric knowledge of their Deaf communities and wider national folklore. Analysis of the language and themes in the poems reveals that sign language components including neologism and use of symmetry can be manipulated directly to celebrate the visual experience of Deaf people. The poetic language can be seen as a way to empower poets and their audiences to understand their place better within the world Deaf community and their own national communities.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Emőke Simon

Abstract Considered as one of the main figures of the avant-garde lyrical cinema, Stan Brakhage questions perception. His language of inquiry constantly confronts the spectator with the limits of visual experience of the world and the multiple possibilities of their transgression. Critically addressing one of his short films, Visions in Meditation n°l (1989),1 this analysis aims to discuss the way movement may become a principle of perception, that is to say, according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition - a mode of transgressing the frame of representation. Reappropriating the cinematographic grammar and submitting it to a vibrating movement, Brakhage invents a rhythm which paves the way for a transcendental experience, meanwhile proposing a reflection on the meditative possibilities of the film in terms of the image in meditation. Gilles Deleuze’s way of thinking of cinema in Cinema 1: Movement-image, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cinema, allows one to consider movement in its cinematographic and philosophical meaning, a project which in Brakhage’s case seems to be primordial


Author(s):  
Laurence Brockliss

Childhood in western Europe is obviously a vast topic, and this entry will approach it historically and largely chronologically. The study of childhood is still relatively new, and historians have sometimes struggled to construct a history of childhood, with very few firsthand accounts and limited archives. So many children left very few traces of their lives, and historians have had to piece together their history, not from diaries or archives but from court reports, visual representations, and childcare manuals. They have had to struggle to recapture the world of childhood in eras prior to 1800, when sources are especially limited. They, like others interested in childhood studies, have had to address the issue of how to define a child and what childhood is. They have had to contemplate the different historical meanings of the word child prior to 1600 and to resist the temptation to believe that childhood has inevitably improved through the centuries. They have also had to become aware of the dangers of historicizing a phenomenon that has few stable parameters and, in some cultures, may not even exist at all. In several languages there is no word for child; even in English, the word has drastically shifted its meaning over the centuries. These shifts need to be historicized in order to see both the continuities and the discontinuities between the past and the present that suggest that childhood has always been a time of suffering; children have always been the victims of perilous disease, parental neglect, government policy, war, etc. Concurrently, children have also always been the hope of the future, the focus of special love and attention. A historical perspective on European childhoods brings this insight into sharp focus.


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 110-124
Author(s):  
David Butow

Photojournalist David Butow has covered social issues, politics, and news events around the world. In his new series “After Hours,” he stays closer to home, photographing at nighttime in spaces that have been vacated or have few people. Strange colors from artificial lighting and the emptiness create a new energy and we take away a visual experience that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.


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