Published! Yay!
Good news, y’all. Another article published!
Firstly, biggest of thanks to Colin Flowers, Barnes Jannuzi, and Mary Peterson for letting me be a part of the team and help get this awesome research out into the world! I was very fortunate to work with these fantastic co-authors from the University of Arizona, where I spent some time as a postdoc.
In this paper, we expanded on a set of stimuli that can be used to test a perceptual mechanism called figure-ground assignment. This mechanism is part of what allows us to individuate (separate) the objects in our environment. Our brain processes borders and edges in our environment, and we use that information to decide where one object ends and another begins. We also use it to help us recognize meaningful objects in ambiguous contexts.
For example, you may have seen this image at some point. Did you see the faces or the vase first?
When you see the faces, those are the figure part of the image and the rest is the ground. When you see the vase, that is the figure and the rest is the ground.
The special thing about the stimuli in this study is that they are designed to allow researchers to ask certain questions about how this figure-ground mechanism works. Questions like:
Does prior experience (memory) have an affect on what we see as the figure? If you had never seen a vase before, would you ever see the vase as figure first?
Does activating the semantics (meaning) of an object make you more likely to see that object as figure? For example, if I showed you the word VASE before showing the picture above, would you be more likely to see the vase as the figure first? Alternatively, if I showed you the word FACE, would you see the faces as figure first?
To make sure the stimuli in this study were suitable for using as a standard stimulus set, we had to make sure the objects in the pictures were recognizable. What if I asked you to look at the picture above and tell me if you see the vase or the apples first?
Waaaaait. Wat?
There are no apples (if you can see apples, you either need coffee or a nap…possibly a doctor). So, if no one can see an apple in the picture, I can’t very well use the picture to gather data about perceiving apples. And even if I design a stimulus that I am totally convinced contains an apple, I still can’t assume that the majority of folks will see the apple.
Just because we are the researchers, doesn’t mean our perceptions apply to everyone. So if we design a stimulus to have an apple in it, we need to make sure that people generally agree that there is an apple in it. The same goes for stimuli that we design to not contain any objects. It’s like seeing shapes in the clouds – we have to make sure that what looks random to us actually looks random to everyone else too. This paper addresses these issues by reporting on data from a lot of folks about what they see in the stimulus set.
That’s the short story! For more details, data, and examples of the images we used have a look at the paper itself. You can see the abstract and download the full article for FREE directly from PLOS ONE.
OR…
You can head over to my Publications page and download it there.
Thanks for reading, y’all! Stay safe and healthy.
kdoh
