Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
March 1, 2005
When you were a child, did you ever bend over and look between your legs to see what the world looked like upside down? If you were like me, you were disappointed: for me, anyways, the world didn't look as different as I had hoped. Though turning things upside down does make it more difficult to…
February 28, 2005
One of the most famous perceptual demos is the ambiguous image or "bi-stable figure" of a duck - rabbit:
(source: curiouser.co.uk)
As presented, it looks like a duck, but rotated to the right, it suddenly "transforms" into a rabbit. There are also images that can transform simply based on how you…
February 25, 2005
Aristotle wrote that drama must be guided by three principles, the Unities. All aspects of a good play must take place in the same location, within a short time period, and contribute to a single plot. Otherwise, forced to stretch their imagination, the audience wouldn't be able to suspend…
February 24, 2005
Literary theory is being influenced more and more by research in cognitive psychology, and as the previous article I discussed showed, psychology research is also influenced by theory. Today's article, "Generating Predictive Inferences While Viewing a Movie" (Joseph P. Magliano, Northern Illinois…
February 17, 2005
Most schools of literary criticism suggest that it's fruitless to attempt to consider what the intentions of the author are; we can only examine the "text" itself: it is the only solid evidence we have. Similarly, critics toss up their hands when trying to comprehend the experience of the reader of…
February 16, 2005
A couple weeks back on my personal blog, I posted a rant about Marshall McLuhan. Basically I was arguing that while the medium may be the message, the medium isn't the only message. There was a fair bit of commentary on my post, both there at Word Munger and around the blogosphere. As expected, I…
February 14, 2005
Today's reading is "Artists as Experts in Visual Cognition," by Aaron Kozbelt of the University of Chicago (Visual Cognition, 2001).
We need to incorporate many skills in order to make visual sense of the world. We must be able to discern objects even when we have incomplete visual information,…
February 10, 2005
How do we tell where an object is in a three-dimensional world when our eye only gives us two dimensions worth of information? Today's reading ("Moving Cast Shadows Induce Apparent Motion in Depth" by Daniel Kersten, Pascal Mamassian, and David Knill of the University of Minnesota [Perception, 1997…
February 4, 2005
Today's reading is "Prior Knowledge on the Illlumination Position" by Pascal Mamassian and Ross Goutcher of the University of Glasgow (Cognition, 2001 [PDF link]).
When we see an embossed seal such as a notary stamp, how do we know which parts are convex (bumps) and which are concave (dimples)?…
February 1, 2005
Today's reading is "When Sound Affects Vision: Effects of Auditory Grouping on Visual Motion Perception," by Katsumi Watanabe and Shinsuke Shimojo of Caltech (Psychological Science, 2001).
In 1997, Sekuler, Sekuler, and Lau discovered a fascinating effect that I've attempted to replicate using the…
January 30, 2005
How do we see things in color? How do we know objects stay the same color when the color of the light they reflect changes as the lighting changes? We see this effect most dramatically in the theater, where the stage lights cover every color of the rainbow, yet we still know the heroine is wearing…
January 26, 2005
Today's reading delves deep into the visual system, so hold your breath and get ready to dive in. It's "Sound-aided Recover from and Persistence Against Visual Filling-in" by Bhavin Sheth and Shinsuke Shimojo of Caltech (Vision Research, 2004). I even found a PDF link for this one.
Ignaz Paul Vital…
January 24, 2005
Today's reading is "The Influence of Head Contour and Nose Angle on the Perception of Eye-Gaze Direction" by Stephen Langton, Helen Honeyman, and Emma Tessler, of University of Stirling (Perception and Psychophysics, 2004).
We're exceptionally good at telling where someone is looking, and we're…
January 20, 2005
Today's reading is "Musical Soundtracks as a Schematic Influence on the Cognitive Processing of Filmed Events," by Marilyn G. Boltz of Haverford College (Music Perception, Summer 2001).
All film is illusion. The illusion of motion is created by a sequence of static frames. The illusion of a three-…