Vision and revision [electronic resource] : cue-triggered perceptual reorganization of two-tone images in US preschoolers and adults

Two-tones are a class of detail-poor ambiguous images that are puzzles for the mind's eye. The images first confuse, then surprise and delight with a flash of perceptual "insight" when the puzzle is solved and the image transforms in the observer's mind into an easily recognizable figure. Such "aha!" moments are achieved without transforming the original two-tone in any way, but instead by simply providing a clue which allows the observer to "solve" the two-tone, for example by verbally labeling the image, or by showing the corresponding photo from which the two-tone was derived. More precisely, we can call this process cue-triggered perceptual reorganization. Drawing on data contrasting effortless performance in adults with striking failures in preschool-aged children and adults from a remote culture, I argue that this phenomenon may be a unique and important case study in visual enculturation. This framing is in contrast to culture-invariant processes such as high-level visual expertise and visual cortical maturation. Instead, I emphasize the core component process of representation revision, arguably a fundamental component of social cognition broadly as well as in specific material symbolic cultural pursuits such as reading. At least three component processes of representational extraction, alignment, and selection are required for successful cue-triggered perceptual reorganization. Cognitive manipulations that simplify these component processes improve preschoolers' performance, consistent with the argument that cue-triggered perceptual reorganization is a problem of representation revision, which itself may be entrained by a material symbolic culture. The data supporting the claims above are laid out in three chapters. Chapter 1 includes five studies demonstrating the robustness of children's difficulties in cue-triggered perceptual reorganization and culminates in the development of an experimental procedure and analysis method for quantifying this effect. Chapter 2 includes two experiments testing children's recognition across a continuous series of images that increase in difficulty from original full grayscale to two-tone in order to see if we can more precisely identify the point at which recognition breaks down, and instead find evidence that this recognition threshold is not absolute, but depends in part on children's mental representation of the photo cue. Chapter 3 includes four different manipulations of children's understanding of the relationship between the photo cue and two-tone image, revealing that cognitive interventions in the same age group and without stimulus simplification can improve recognition performance. Together these studies support the existence of a striking failure of cue-triggered perceptual reorganization in children that can best be understood as a failure of visual representation revision, a cognitive process already achievable by the preschool years, but not yet fully entrained by US culture.

Keywords: Psychology
Advisor: Markman Ellen M.
Dougherty Robert F. advisor. Thesis advisor
Frank Michael C. (Professor of human biology) advisor. Thesis advisor
Norcia Anthony Matthew advisor. Thesis advisor
Wagner Anthony David advisor. Thesis advisor