The Irreducibility of Vision: Gestalt, Crowding and the Fundamentals of Vision

Abstract

What is fundamental in vision has been discussed for millennia. For philosophical realists and the physiological approach to vision, the objects of the outer world are truly given, and failures to perceive objects properly, such as in illusions, are just sporadic misperceptions. The goal is to replace the subjectivity of the mind by careful physiological analyses. Continental philosophy and the Gestaltists are rather skeptical or ignorant about external objects. The percepts themselves are their starting point, because it is hard to deny the truth of one own′s percepts. I will show that, whereas both approaches can well explain many visual phenomena with classic visual stimuli, they both have trouble when stimuli become slightly more complex. I suggest that these failures have a deeper conceptual reason, namely that their foundations (objects, percepts) do not hold true. I propose that only physical states exist in a mind independent manner and that everyday objects, such as bottles and trees, are perceived in a mind-dependent way. The fundamental processing units to process objects are extended windows of unconscious processing, followed by short, discrete conscious percepts.

Specific Gestalt principles cannot explain (un)crowding

“…However, we propose there is another main problem, namely, that the external world is much richer, i.e., there are much more fundamental entities (the physical particles), than mental representations. One can mathematically show that, in this situation, mind-independent ordinary objects cannot occur (Herzog and Doerig, 2021;Herzog, 2022). Apples are not the starting point of perception, they are the outcomes of perception.…”

“…We see many illusory things that are not out there. For example, we see blue spiral lines in the Munker-White illusion, which are simply not there (see Figure 2 of Herzog, 2022). In this case, a simple re-transformation cannot help.…”

Scaling models of visual working memory to natural images

“…Another potential reason that our DNNs failed to adequately capture human responses with simple color and orientation features is that the color and orientation stimuli were far from their training distribution, and thus in a sense, the networks did not “understand” the content of the image. For example, human participants naturally parse such images into a set of objects with configural properties [31, 32]. We reasoned that an appropriate fine-tuning procedure might endow our models with similar abilities.…”

Implementación del visual thinking en bachillerato: una experiencia de innovación docente

“…Estas afirmaciones encuentran su fundamento y raíces en la teoría de la Gestalt, que concibe la percepción como el proceso esencial de la actividad mental, y considera que otras actividades psicológicas, tales como la memoria, el aprendizaje o el pensamiento, dependen del funcionamiento del proceso de organización perceptual (Yalcinkaya y Singh, 2019;Herzog, 2022). Partiendo de estos planteamientos nace el VT con el propósito de desarrollar la participación, la reflexión crítica, la síntesis de diferentes puntos de vista y el pensamiento complejo (Nelson, 2017).…”