Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewSituating vision in the world
Section snippets
Demonstrative reference
Using what I have been referring to as demonstrative references avoids the need to encode a scene exhaustively in terms of absolute or global properties and can instead refer to certain relations between the objects and the perceiver/actor. This simplifies certain kinds of planning by providing information in an optimal form for making decisions about actions. Box 1 illustrates three possible ways in which a robot might represent an environment through which it must navigate. It demonstrates
Multiple object tracking
Experimental research on visual indexes started with the following experiment (Fig. 1). Eight identical circles appear on a screen and four of them flicker briefly. Subsequently, all eight circles begin to move randomly on the screen and continue to do so for about ten seconds, after which they stop moving. The observer’s task is to keep track of the four circles that initially flickered (but are now identical to the other circles) and to identify them at the end of the trial. The only special
Other evidence of visual indexes
A basic assumption of visual indexing theory is that the visual system has a way of selecting and accessing a small number of visual objects without having to use a description. If this is true, then establishing indexes for several objects should allow an observer to select them rapidly by following pointers provided by indexes, without having to search for an object that fits a description. In addition to the multiple object tracking studies described above, two lines of evidence from my
Object-file theory
Danny Kahneman and co-workers37 showed in several experiments that individual objects (as opposed to their locations or other properties) provide the locus for storing and accessing various properties associated with those objects. They made use of the well-known ‘priming effect’, whereby the prior occurrence of a particular letter decreases the recognition time for that letter. Kahneman et al.37 showed that the priming effect for a letter traveled with the box in which it had occurred (Fig. 3
Conclusions
I have argued that the visual system (and perhaps also the cognitive system) needs a special kind of direct reference mechanism to refer to objects without having to encode their properties. Thus, on initial contact, objects are not interpreted as belonging to a certain type or having certain properties; in other words, objects are initially detected without being conceptualized. This kind of direct reference is provided by what is referred to as a demonstrative, or more generally, an
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Jerry Fodor and Brian Scholl for their contributions to the ideas contained in this article. The research reported here was supported in part by NIMH Grant 1R01-MH60924 awarded to the author.
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Mental files: Developmental integration of dual naming and theory of mind
2020, Developmental ReviewCitation Excerpt :Mental files theory (Recanati, 2012) provides the conceptual tools and a cognitive structure to answer these questions. Mental files theory (Murez & Recanati, 2016) aims to unify research in which the notion of a mental file has been used under different guises: “notion” or “file” in philosophy (Perry, 2002; Strawson, 1974), “discourse referent” in linguistics (Karttunen, 1976), “object file” in psychological research on attention (Kahneman, Treisman, & Gibbs, 1992), object search (Treisman, 1982), and object tracking (Pylyshyn, 2000); short term memory and object individuation in infancy (Xu & Carey, 1996; Scholl & Leslie, 1999). A mental file can be characterized by the following features (based on Recanati, 2012):
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2016, Consciousness and CognitionCitation Excerpt :Attention can also operate on things in the world that display object-like properties, such as cohesion, symmetry, and common fate (for reviews, see Chen, 2012; Scholl, 2001). Object-based attention requires a two-stage process that begins with the (generally automatic) individuation of objects (Pylyshyn, 2000). Selective attention operates upon these “indexed” items in order to bind object features, which are made available through feature maps (Treisman & Gelade, 1980), resulting in sustained object-based mental representations that allow object identification.
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