PSY270H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Prosopagnosia, Simple Cell, Visual Perception
Document Summary
Visual agnosia: loss of ability to recognize objects, preserved ability to navigate and reach, prosopagnosia (ability to recognize faces, caused by bilateral damage to occipital/temporal lobes. Inability to navigate and reach (can"t tell where the object is): preserved ability to recognize objects, caused by damage to parietal areas. Recognizing objects: template theory: comparison of perceived representation and memory representation, feature analysis theory: fixed set of elementary properties analyzed independently in parallel across visual field. Challenges with template theory: massive number of templates are necessary, predicts no transfer to novel views of the same objects, objects are often obstructed. They often have preference for stimuli moving in certain directions: hypercomplex cells: fire maximally to more complicated sets of specific features. If an image is kept completely still on the retina, it will slowly fade from view: caused by individual feature detectors become habituated or fatigued with prolonged firing.
