Part A:

1. Consider a famous painting. Identify at least one Gestalt principle that influences your perceptual organization of this painting. Explain how your perception is influenced by the Gestalt principle. Why is this information important?

2. Watch the "Optical Illusions Show How We See" video. Select and describe an optical illusion. Show the illusion to another individual. How did your perceptions differ? Apply the principles of motion and depth perception to explain your answer. Here is the link to the video: http://fod.infobase.com/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=48153

3. What are the steps in object recognition from the retina to Infero temporal cortex?

4. What is the evolutionary advantage of trichomacy? What other systems are there in the animal kingdom?

5. What is the difference between local and global motion? How do V1 and MT contribute differently to motion perception?

Part B: Please participate (respond) to the classmates answers with notable and educational input. (200 word minimum Reponses)

1. Kelly: Hello classmates and facilitator. I am not sure if this falls into the category of Gestalt perceptions, but the painting I am thinking of is one that I saw in a museum one day. It was really amazing. At first I was standing far away from it and it showed a painting of a lady sitting on a picnic basket by a tree right beside a lake and holding an umbrella. It was beautiful. Then someone came up to me and told me to go up to the picture and take a better look. When I went right up to the painting I noticed it was not what I had expected. This picture was made from a bunch of pictures of other people and other things and the artist had organized them to where when they were grouped all together it would look like a completely different picture. This was really amazing to me. This has to do with Gestalt perception because from far off what you see is one thing, but when you get right up on it, you see that it is not at all what you thought you were seeing. Class does this sound like a form of Gestalt perception?

2. Ashley:I really enjoyed Beau Lotto's presentation about optical illusions. I found it interesting when he said that "...we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world -- not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye. This is a huge problem because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources" ("TedTalks: Beau Lotto," 2009).

With this statement, it kind of leaves me with an unsettled feeling, like how do I know that what I'm looking at is actually as it appears, or at least how I am perceiving it. I love optical illusions and seeing how things are not always as they appear due to differentiating factors like light and position. This is a great expansion on what we learned last week about spatial organization!

I also liked this direct quote from Lotto's presentation, "the light that falls on to your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally. There is no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters" ("TedTalks: Beau Lotto," 2009).

3. Cal Kell: Hello classmates and facilitator. The one illusion in this video that really stuck out to me was staring at the dot between to colors. This is how it went. You had four pictures. Up top you have a green square and a red square with a white dot inbetweeen them and on the bottom you have a scenery picture of a sand dune and they are set as mirrored images and also had a white dot between the two pictures. The first thing you do is stare at the white dot between the green and red squares. After so long of staring there you move your eyes down to the scenery and amazingly the colors have been transformed onto the scenery pictures. I did this experiment with my fiancé and he was amazed. It cannot understand how it happened. I really do not know how to explain it. I would have to say this has a lot to do with the motion of your eyes. You immediately look down and your eyes have not had a chance to adjust to the new pictures you are looking at. What other explanation can you come up with class to explain this illusion? (Lotto, 2009).