Research 

 

Overview

 

You open your eyes and recognize objects and people, and you know where they are located.  You know which portions of the visual field represent objects and which represent the spaces between them, and you readily distinguish between shadows and objects.  These behaviors hardly seem to be accomplishments; indeed they seem effortless.

 

However, scientists know that such perceptions are not easy, because they cause great difficulty for people born with cataracts who have their vision restored when they are adults.  Nor are they easy for computers, although it was once believed they would be.  The idea that vision is easy arises from the assumption that seeing is like taking a photograph – it simply copies the physical world. But perception depends very much on the viewer’s task, attentional set, and past experience.  Even elementary processes, such as segmenting objects from their backgrounds, require complex processing..

 

Peterson’s Visual Perception and Cognition laboratory uses behavioral, psychophysiological, and imaging methods in normal and brain-damaged individuals. 

 

 

Stimuli for download

 

 

 

 

Novel, enclosed silhouettes [download]

Subsets of these stimuli were used in Trujillo et al. (2010), Sanguinetti et al. (2013), Salvagio et al. (2012), Peterson et al. (2012), and Cacciamani et al. (2014).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OMEFA stimuli [download]

These stimuli were used in Peterson et al., (2000), Peterson et al. (1998),Peterson & Gibson (1991), Gibson and Peterson (1994),  Peterson & Gibson (1994a), and Barense et al. (2012)

 

 

 

 

 

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Convexity context stimuli [download]

These stimuli were used in Peterson & Salvagio (2008), and Barense et al. (2012)