Visual System Processes of Incoming Information - Essay Example

Visual System Processes of Incoming Information Visual System Processes of Incoming Information Vision can be said to be a very important human sense because of the manner in which it enables human beings to see the details in their environment. Visual processing serves the purpose of taking information from the world around human beings and making sense out of it. Vision is commonly defined as the capability of sensing and interpreting light. The organs that are entrusted with enabling visual sense are the eyes. Eyes do this by converting light energy that is incoming into electric signals. However, this changing of light energy to electric signals cannot be said to be all that entails a vision. Vision also involves activities such as interpretation of visual stimuli, the process of perception, and cognition. This paper aims at discussing the general principles that govern how the visual system processes incoming information. The processing of visual information begins when the eye gets information from the environment in the form of light energy. It is obvious that the brain cannot make use of this information for decision making or any other purpose in this state. The information, therefore, needs to go through a process that will turn it into usable information (Sternberg & Mio, 2009). The first essential transformation takes place in the eye. The transformation takes place in a part of the eye known as the retina. The retina serves the purposes of transducing the light that comes into the eye in the form of electromagnetic energy into neural energy. Within the retina, there is a section that is known as the fovea. When a person focusses their eyes on the target object, what they do at that point is placing the target on the fovea. It can, therefore, be concluded that human beings depend on their fovea for clear vision. This explains why people usually find it hard to see objects that are to the left hand and right hand sides of the target they are looking at. The explanation given can also explain why human beings always have it hard when it comes to deducing substantial information from moving objects. By the time the retina is through with information, the information normally leaves the eye for further processing and interpretations. Object recognition is an important part of visual information processing system. Object recognition enables human beings to recognize objects’ physical properties such as object colour, texture, and shape. This in most cases helps human beings in deducing unseen information about objects. The unseen information includes information about their uses, how objects are related to one another, and the previous experiences that involved the seen object. One of the theories that explain the recognition of an object by human beings is the theory of recognition by components. This theory explains why human beings can be able to recognize objects, even in a situation where the object have their images oriented and size changed. The major proposal of this theory is that it suggests that visual systems get geons, then make use of them in identifying objects. Geons is a collective term used to refer to simple volumes such as wedges, cubes, cylinders, and spheres. Under this theory, the object being perceived goes through complete analysis of the visual system. The visual system does this by phasing the perceived object into the geons that it belongs to. This is when the interrelations between aspects such as location and size are determined. The interrelations and geons of the perceived objects are matched against the structural descriptions that are stored. The recognition of the object will only be successful if there is a reasonable match that results from the process mentioned. It is possible to have two or more objects having certain parts that are similar. This is what makes a proper spiral organization important for object recognition in human beings. Discrimination between objects that have parts that are similar or seem to be similar should go through discriminative analysis that must involve their spiral interrelations. This can cause the realization of the fact that if the subsets of 2 or 3 geons can be seen and their spiral orders are correct then the object recognition process is likely to be successful. The information about objects such as its size that is seen in the retina is usually dependent on the distance between the viewer and the object (Roeckelein, 2004). However, the complexity of the vision system enables human beings to perceive the accurate information regardless of these differences. When it comes to understanding, perception, there is a theory of brain and mind referred to as Gestalt psychology or gestaltism. This theory suggests that the brain operates on a principle that is parallel, holistic, and analog. The theory also suggests that the brain also has self-organizing tendencies that help it during the processing of visual information. The idea of this theory has its basis on the theories of Immanuel Kant and Jonathan Wolfgang Von Goethe. However, the concepts of this theory were first used in contemporary psychology and physiology by Christian Von Ehrenfels in the year 1890 (Kandel, 2008). The most important principle of Gestalt perception is the pragnanz law. Pragnanz is a German word that means pithiness. This principle claims that human beings tend to order their experience in a way that is orderly, regular, simple, and systematic. Through such an understanding, psychologists can be able to predict the possible interpretation of sensation. This principle has six laws which give psychologists the guideline on how to apply this principle (Milner & Goodale, 2006). The law of similarity states that human mind categories element with similarities into collective totalities or entities. The similarity depends on features such as size, colour, brightness, or darkness. The law of closure claims that the human mind might experience elements that it cannot perceive through perception, just to complete a regular figure. The law of proximity states that temporal or partial proximity of objects may induce the human mind to perceive a totality or collectivity. The law of symmetry states that the human mind perceives symmetrical images collectively. This is independent of the distance. The law of common fate asserts that element moving towards the same direction can be perceived by the mind as a single unit. The final of the six laws is the law of continuity. This law states that the mind continues auditory, kinetic, and visual patterns. The grouping criteria discussed above can be used in reference to processes that seem to affect the whole human mind. These laws can be translated at the activity level of single neurons in a specific cortical area. When a monkey has its attention drawn to a curve, the neurons in the primary visual cortex with respective fields on the curve enhance the activities of the monkey. This information can be used as a proof to the fact that neurons at the most initial level of the visual hierarchy are affected by attention and as such visual processing does not take place entirely through feedforward but also through feedback (source & Murata-Soraci, 2003). This mechanism can also be applied to explain how a gestalt law can be translated on the basis of patterns of neuron firing in the curve tracing task. Attention can speed up the rate at which human being processes visual information. There are two main frameworks that can be used to explain the role of attention in visual information processing. These frameworks are: the selection for action framework and the selection for perceptual framework. The selection for perceptual framework asserts that conscious related processing or perception supposes the collection of useful information during the process. Selection in the action framework asserts that the constraints of actions make it necessary for selection to take place. However, it is also noticeable that attention can be influenced in various ways by stimuli of various shapes (Coon, Mitterer, Talbot & Vanchella, 2010). Some shapes have the capability of attracting more information as compared to others. For example, shapes such as diamonds were discovered to attract more attention than the others such as spheres. Every time a person opens up their eyes, they are confronted with visual information that can be in some instances overwhelming. Covert attention enables human beings to select the useful information from the environment. Given that the visual information processing system cannot process all information that is available, it is always important for selection of the relevant information must take place. This is what makes attention important to the process. An attentional selection that is active usually takes place over time and space. At sometimes the attention can always shift from one part of the environment to another. What is not clear is whether the attention has some influence on the intermediate space in between the initial point of attention and a new one. Attention can also be split over multiple objects. The only problem with such incidents is that the human brain will strain in trying to process the multiple information (Hubel & Wiesel, 2004). Another important aspect of the visual system is visual mental imagery. Visual mental imagery refers to the presentation that people usually have of the physical world around them. Human beings always remember past occurrences or imagine probable ones by forming mental images. The dream that human beings are being also mostly as a result of mental imagery. It is also believed that the human consciousness is made up of mental imagery and immediate perceptual experience. There are three main theories that tend to explain the process of human imagery. These theories are: description theory, the picture theory, and the inactive theory. The picture theory suggests that the mental visual images can be identified with representations in the brain or mind that are in some ways like a picture. In some instances, it has also always been said that they represent things in the same manner pictures do. This theory is probably the oldest and most popular of the mental imagery theories. However, this theory can be said to be just a folk theory in the modern world. Since the 1970s, various cognitive scientists, most popular of them being Stephen Kosslyn developed the primary notion of the mental image as the inner picture into a more detailed and sophisticated scientific model that was created as a result of a wide range of findings from experiments. The most recent version of this theory suggests that visual mental images can be embodied as spatially stretched patterns that are two dimensions of neural excitation particularly in the retinotopically mapped cortices in the human brain. The description theory initially began as an attempt to have a better understanding of how the imagery phenomena could fit a computational theory of the human mind. The manner in which computers represent information is more of a language than pictures. The syntax and vocabulary internal brain language that is hypothetical can be very different from that of any other language that people speak. However, it is said to be language-like because of the way it ultimately has symbolic tokens representing things that are in the world in much the same manner in which the words of human languages do (Clark, 2008). This is not through resemblance some essential correspondent relations that are arbitrary. In the cases of natural languages, this correspondence is always established in the social convection. In the case of computer programs that are human written, it is the programmer who sets the external reference of token that are symbolic. This theory is believed to have paid very minimal attention to quasi-pictorial theory to the problem of exactly how human beings come to consciously experience images. It is clear that the theory does not present a metalized description of the imagery process. However, the idea in this theory seems to be that people can sometimes have conscious knowledge of whatever they present. Just like the quasi-pictorialists, these theorists seem to be completely committed to the notion that mental representations, inclusive of the symbolic tokens of mentalese that is elementary, and the symbol complexes that constitute visual description, are instantiated physically as a pattern of brain excitation (Nilsson & Lindberg, 2008). However, this leaves us with just one problem. It seems like it is impossible to know how patterns of human brain excitation can be, or lead to conscious experiences as human beings know it. The enactive theory is in various ways different from both the quasi-pictorial and description theories. Both descriptive and quasi-pictorial theories attempt to give an explanation of how quasi-visual experience and imagery can be explained in the context of the information processing perception. The enactive theory instead regards vision as a matter of information that flow through the human eyes to the human brain, then eventually towards the internal centre of consciousness. This theory regards the mental imagery process as an issue of the visual process continuously seeking and getting information that is desired information from the environment that an individual is in (Vecchi & Bottini, 2006). Under this theory, seeing can be looked at like performing a series of scientific measurements and tests on the ambient light that always have some information with it in the human environment. If an object is placed against the human skin, they can usually tell very little about this object. This is always very different cases where the human vision is used instead. This is particularly very true in a case where the object being used is new to the individual. The movement of the human eyes can be said to be the most common aspect of the visual information seeking process. This action is believed to be unconscious. However, eye movement is not all that the process entails. This theory states that human beings are always aware of the actual things that take place in front of their eyes. The excitation pattern of the visual cortex has information about the surroundings of human beings (Spillmann & Werner, 1990). However, it only gives rise to visual awareness and knowledge if the data source is taken through purposeful observation and querying. Vision can be said to be a blessing and at the same time burden of human life. As much as it allows human beings to get information in such as fast rate and speed, it also makes the human brain work too much, in order to make sense of the information fed to it through vision. However, this cannot mean that the human being can downplay the importance of a sense of vision in their lives. With such a notion, it will be easy to know exactly why psychologists need to know the general principles govern how the visual system processes incoming information. Through this paper one can know that the processing of visual information is a complex one. However, by knowing and understanding how human beings process visual information, psychologists can be able to predict and understand how human beings react to the various visual information that is found in their environment. With such knowledge, psychologists can also be able to control and manipulate these reactions in order to get positive ones. References Azad, P. (2009). Visual perception for manipulation and imitation in humanoid robots. Berlin: Springer. Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coon, D., Mitterer, J. O., Talbot, S., & Vanchella, C. M. (2010). Introduction to psychology: Gateways to mind and behavior. 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