"NASA's HiRISE camera, the most powerful camera ever sent into space, has snapped breathtaking portraits of Mars. From 'trees' on Mars to an 'organic cemetery,' see the 'Red Planet's' craters, dunes, gullies, and even avalanches in stunning detail in the slideshow below."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/mars-pictures-nasas-most_n_431137.html
How does the brain resolve ambiguity? Experience this for yourself when you watch this slide show. Use a little introspection and 'watch' how your brain tries to go about it's job making sense of the extraordinary pictures in this slide show.
One way the brain resolves ambiguity is to compare/imagine these structural images to objects we have already experienced or identified during our lifetime. I found that I did this for every picture. There were some I could not think of anything that looked like the picture. I found terms that relate to what I am trying to explain through introspection and have summarized the details below.
Perhaps the visual system extracts geons and uses them to identify these objects. Geons are simple volumes such as cubes, spheres, cylinders, and wedges. Recognition-by-components proposes that representations of objects are stored in the brain as structural descriptions. A structural description contains a specification of the object’s geons and their interrelations (e.g., the cube is above the cylinder). The perceived object is analyzed by the visual system, which breaks down the object into its basic geons. The geons and interrelations of the perceived object are compared against the already stored structural descriptions, which then you experience aspects such as relative location and size (e.g., the lamp shade is left-of, below, and larger-than the fixture). If a good match is found, then successful object recognition will occur.
This information was found at:
http://www.pigeon.psy.tufts.edu/avc/kirkpatrick/default.htm#RBC
According to my textbook, recognition is our ability to place an object in a category by assembling its parts in a way that enable us to recognize the object as a whole. From all the pictures in the slideshow I could make sense of only two; the one that’s shows an avalanche and the one with the South Pole region. They both looked like something I have seen before. I notice that these two have colors that I identify as soil or dirt but the other pictures seem to be paintings, or like a picture of DNA or bacteria taken by a microscope. The colors, the textures, the shapes, they all look like a work of art. They seem to be a creation from someone’s imagination not something real.