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Our brain does the reverse of computer animation – it starts by seeing ‘raster’ pixels from your eyes, and turns it all into its own version of a ‘vector’ model.
This is useful because it helps us
- identify things
- Evaluate them
- Search for things
- Act on them
We discussed #1 on this list here, and the rest are on page 2.
Most of these processes work through a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing.
- Bottom-up is where your brain assembles information from its senses
- Top-down is where your brain takes information from memory and uses this to help interpret what its bottom-up processes think they are seeing
- Naive realism is people’s belief that what they think they are seeing is how things really are. It is often accurate, but not always
- Gestalt is an old German school of psychology thought which says that people fuse their understanding from lots of different cues into one ‘whole’ meaning.
- This is useful because it simplifies the huge amount of information our senses often take in down to a manageable amount number of ideas
- This is also useful because it helps us correct what we are seeing – fill in missing elements, and seamlessly fix bits that were distorted somehow.