Experience and perception
Name
230958084-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
14.28 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6cfee3245c99acaca7398a4bef4ef9c7
Author(s)
Witthoft, Nathan (Nathan S.)
Advisor(s)
Lera Boroditsky.
Date Issued
2007
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
To what extent can experience shape perception? In what ways does perception vary across people or even within the same person at different times? This thesis presents three lines of research examining the role of experience on perception. The first section presents evidence from synesthesia suggesting that learning can influence letter-synesthesia pairings and that associative learning can affect relatively early visual processing. The second section examines the role of linguistic categorization in color judgments, finding that language can play an online role even in a relatively simple color discrimination task. The final section examines how perception adjusts over relatively short time scales using face adaptation. The adaptation experiments show that adaptation to faces can improve recognition performance on famous faces. The results further demonstrate that these effects can be obtained without extensive training and that contrary to proposals from experiments using face spaces, that identity based adaptation effects can be found on trajectories which do not pass through the average face.
Description
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2007.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-123).
Subjects
Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
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