Human minds parse continuous spatial input into discrete entities.
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Peer-reviewed cognitive literature establishes that the human mind parses continuous spatial and temporal experience into discrete individual units and representational objects.
The physical world provides humans with continuous streams of experience in both space and time. The human mind, however, can parse and organize this continuous input into discrete, individual units. In the current work, we characterize the representational signatures of basic units of human experience across the spatial (object) and temporal (event) domains. We propose that there are three shared, abstract signatures of individuation underlying the basic units of representation across the two domains. Specifically, individuated entities in both the spatial domain (objects) and temporal domain (bounded events) resist restructuring, have distinct parts, and do not tolerate breaks; unindividuated entities in both the spatial domain (substances) and the temporal domain (unbounded events) lack these features. In three experiments, we confirm these principles and discuss their significance for cognitive and linguistic theories of objects and events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Human visual processing is limited-we can only track a few moving objects at a time and store a few items in visual working memory (WM). A shared mechanism that may underlie these performance limits is how the visual system parses a scene into representational units. In the present study, we explored whether multiple-object tracking (MOT) and WM rely on a common item-based indexing mechanism. We measured the contralateral delay activity (CDA), an event-related slow wave that tracks load in an item-based manner, as participants completed a combined WM and MOT task, concurrently tracking items and remembering visual information. In Experiment 1, participants tracked one or two moving discs without needing to remember the discs' colors (track and ignore condition) or while also remembering the discs' colors (two or four colors in total; track and remember condition). In Experiment 2, participants attended either two static discs or two moving discs, while remembering the discs' colors (two or four colors). In both experiments, the CDA was largely determined by the tracking task-CDA amplitudes reflected the number of tracked discs and not the number of to-be-remembered colors. However, when the discs were static, the CDA amplitudes did reflect color load. We discuss this set of findings in relation to longstanding theories of visual cognition (fingers of instantiation and object files) and the implications for cognitive models of representation of visual information-that how a scene is parsed into item-based representations is a key mechanism in the operation of WM.
When we look at the world—or a graphical depiction of the world—we perceive surface materials (e.g. a ceramic black and white checkerboard) independently of variations in illumination (e.g. shading or shadow) and atmospheric media (e.g. clouds or smoke). Such percepts are partly based on the way physical surfaces and media reflect and transmit light and partly on the way the human visual system processes the complex patterns of light reaching the eye. One way to understand how these percepts arise is to assume that the visual system parses patterns of light into layered perceptual representati
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