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Level 4 course "Recognition and representation":
Perceiving, acting, knowing, remembering

By Stephen W. Draper

This corresponds to handout 1.

Plan

0. Top-down vs. bottom-up debate.
A. Representation (to lead into connectionism)
Why we feel representation is crucially important
BUT why representation might NOT be necessary: Brooks, connectionism, ?
Certainly why naive representation is not the thing (Rorty)
Memory depends on representation (ditto recog, percep, action)
B. Recognition (and perspectives on it)
It is only one of the functions of perception
Recog. as a task/proc, not as a mirror+match. Discrim trees.
Multi-attribute, multi-modal. (=>Attack conventional factoring of psych.)
Bartlett schemas
Invariants: what perception might be like if is NOT a mirror of our conscious understanding
C. Gibson
Ecological psychology / approach to perception (generalise functional approach)
Invariants. Direct perception.; Perceptual systems (not sensory receptors). Affordance
CC. Gibson (alternative grouping)
Anti-reductionism; only got to work in particular niche
Pro-function, not "knowledge". Lots of inputs, not analytically clean ones
D. Summary of the de-dissociations:
D1 Action/perception; perception/memory; action/memory. knowing,memory,learning.
D2 What are perception's inputs? its outputs?
True outputs: consider organism and environment together.
True input: the array of information, ready to be picked up.

Questions for critical thinking

It is usual to provide some questions for further thinking, to stimulate deep learning. However, untypically, this section of lectures was all about getting you to consider deeper questions rather than introducing much new technical material. So hopefully most of what I said was in effect such a question (e.g. "is the concept of invariant sensible and/or useful?"). So I will only suggest one deep deep question:

Which of the questions I tried to discuss with you are in fact important issues, and which are not?

Reading list

Top down/ Bottom up
[TD vision in AI] Oatley ch.7 OR Boden p.180ff.
[TD vision for psychology] Gregory
Representations
[representations: why powerful] Oatley ch.6 esp. p.141ff.
[Anti-representations] Brooks' 2 papers
Recognition is not the only function of vision
Horizon transcript on the man who lost his body [lost proprioception, used vision to compensate]. See also Bernstein 4th edition, p.121; Sacks (1985).
Invariants
Gender from gait: Cutting (1978), Cutting et al. (1978)
Invariant for age: Pittenger et al 1979; and Todd et al. 1980; see also Bruce & Green p.368ff.
Gibson
Bruce & Green chs. 10, 17. (And the Gibson books.)
De-dissociations
[Review the cases discussed in class to find illustratrations of problems with each dissociation.]
Post-class
Look at Gregory, and above all Gibson.

References

N.B. NIL means Not In Library i.e. not in the Glasgow University library

J.J.Gibson

1950 The perception of the visual world Level 6 Main Lib Psychology D230 GIB2
1966 The senses considered as perceptual systems Level 6 Main Lib Psy D380 GIB and ASB
1979 The ecological approach to visual perception Level 6 Main Lib Psychology D230 GIB

Others

Bartlett,F.C. Remembering (CUP) psy F290 bar

Bernstein et al. (1997) Psychology (Current first year textbook; 4th edition)

Berry,D.S. & McArthur,L.Z. (1986) "Perceiving character in faces: the impact of age-related craniofacial changes on social perception" Psychological bulletin vol.100 no.1 pp.3-18

Boden,M. (1977 Artificial Intelligence and natural man (Basic books) Computing J20

Bruce,V. & Green,P.R. (1990) Visual perception: physiology, psychology and ecology 2nd edition psy F10

Brooks, R.A. (1986) "A robust layered control system for a mobile robot" IEEE journal of robotics and automation vol.RA-2 no.1 pp.14-23. Engineering periodicals

Brooks, R.A. (1991) "Intelligence without representation" Artificial Intelligence vol.47 pp.139-159.

Cutting, J.E. (1978) "Generation of synthetic male and female walkers through manipulation of a biomechanical invariant" Perception vol.7 pp.393-405

Cutting, J.E., Proffitt,D.R. & Kozlowski,L.T. (1978) "A biomechanical invariant for gait perception" J.E.P.: Human perception and performance vol.4 pp.357-372

Gregory,R.L. (1980) "Perceptions as hypotheses" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society series B vol.290 pp.181-197

Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von. (1968) Helmholtz on perception: its physiology and development compiled by Richard M. Warren, Roslyn P. Warren (Wiley) Psy D380 HEL

Horizon (1997, 16 Oct) "The man who lost his body" Programme shown on BBC2. Transcript etc. available as WWW document URL http://www.bbc.co.uk/horizon/lostbody.html

Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1983) "Mental Models." (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.).

Katona, G. (1940/1967) Organizing and memorizing: studies in the psychology of learning and teaching (New York: Hafner). esp. pp.9-15 psy F35

Oatley,K. (1978) Perceptions and representations (Macmillan: New York) psy F10

Peirce , Charles Sanders , 1839-1914. Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. (Cambridge (Mass) : Harvard U.P.) Phil HD152 1931-H

Pittenger,J.B. Shaw,R.E. & Mark,L.S. (1979) "Perceptual information for the age level of faces as a higher order invariant of growth" JEP: Human perception and performance vol.5 no.3 pp.478-493

Rorty, R. (1980) "Philosophy and the mirror of nature" (Blackwell: Oxford). NIL

Runerson, S. (1977) "On the possibility of 'smart' perceptual mechanisms" Scandinavian journal of psychology vol.18 pp.172-179 NIL

Sacks, O. (1985) The man who mistook his wife for a hat ch.3 pp.42-52 "The disembodied lady" (Picador: London)

Simon, H.A. (1969) The sciences of the artificial (MIT press; Cambridge, Mass.)

Todd,J.T., Mark,L.S., Shaw,R.E. & Pittenger,J.B. (1980) "The perception of human growth" Scientific American vol.242 Feb. pp.132-144 floor 2 GenSci periodicals

Wittgenstein, L. (1977) Remarks on colour (ed. by G.E.M.Anscombe) (Oxford: Blackwell)

Level 4 course "Recognition and representation": Perceiving, acting, knowing, remembering