What we would like you to do is to find a topic from this week's chapter that you were interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find a video clip that demonstrates something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. Please be sure to use at least 3 quality resources. If you use videos, please limit it to one video.
Once you have completed your search and explorations we would like you to:
1a) State what your topic is.
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner. By integrating/synthesizing we mean taking what your read/experienced from the internet search organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using the information you have about the topic.
Synthesizing information is hard for some people to do - many students write what we refer to as "serial abstracts." They are tempted to talk about the websites rather than the topic proper Serial abstract writers will talk all about website #1, start a new paragraph and talk all about web site #2, start a new paragraph and talk all about web site #3, and then write some kind of conclusion about the three websites they used. Serial means one after the other...again, this is what you DON'T want to do! We want you to talk about the topic, not the websites!
Also, if all three sites are on the same one topic it will be easier.
At first it is a real challenge to get out of the habit of writing "serial abstracts," but we assure you once you get the hang of it writing about the topic is much easier to do using the integration method. And besides this is the way researchers and scientists write their technical reports and findings - many of you will have to be able to do this for other classes and for jobs that you may eventually be hired for so now is a good time to learn this skill.
At this point don't worry so much about a grade, worry about doing your best to have fun with the topic and then integrate it into your own words to share what you found and what you now know.
3) List the terms you used from the text and from your reference websites.
4) At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
1a) State what your topic is: The Figure-ground assignment
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
This topic comes directly from Chapter 4 in our textbook page 104. It definitely goes with what we have been discussing due to the visual perception, the Gestalt School, and the classic vase/face figure introduced by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin is illustrated in our book as well.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I was really intrigued by the fact that once again our brain overrides what we see and we determine which part of an object we are going to choose to take in and or see to believe. The properties of the whole object take precedence over the properties of parts of the object. And I was fascinated by how or why our brain does this. I also wanted to know if there was a way to train our brains to look at things a certain way or is it something that is embedded in our brain right from the beginning.
First-ground assignment is a type of perceptual grouping that is a basic necessity for recognizing objects through vision. In Gestalt psychology it is known as identifying a figure from the background. This can be directed liked to Edgar John Rubin, a Danish psychologist/phenomenologist. Most people know this to be the Rubin Vase effect and that it embodies the complexities of the brain’s recognition of visual figures and backgrounds. One example of this could also be as simple as words on a printed paper as the "figure" and the white sheet as the "background".
The fundamental principle of first-ground assignment is basically saying that when two fields have a common border, and one is seen as figure and the other as ground, the immediate perceptual experience is characterized by a shaping effect which emerges from the common border of the fields and operates only on one field or does this more strongly on one than on the other. The visual effect allows someone with two shape interpretations, one is consistent with the what the retina or retinal image allowed through as only one can be showed at one time. And this is because the bounding contour will be seen as belonging to the figure shape, which appears interposed against a formless background. If the latter region is interpreted instead as the figure, then the same bounding contour will be seen as belonging to it.
One of the most common questions is why? And from what I discovered the brain classifies images by which object surrounds which – therefore establishing depth and relationships. If one object surrounds another object, the surrounded object is seen as figure, and the presumably further away (the background) object is the ground, and vice versa. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense, imagine a shoe that is lying on the ground, one would want to pay attention to the "figure" and not the "ground". However, when the contours are not so unequal, ambiguity starts to creep into the previously simple inequality, and the brain must begin "shaping" what it sees. It can be said that this shaping overrides and is at a higher level than feature recognition processes that pull together the face and the vase images. You can believe the lower levels putting together distinct regions of the picture but when the brain tries to make sense of it as a whole, contradictions ensue, and patterns are then discarded.
Recent studies show that there are lower-region preference in figure–ground assignment, the results only concern the initial perception of figure and ground. However, figure–ground assignment is bistable in that figural assignment can be reversed; the figure can become ground and vice versa, as in Rubin’s (1915/1958) famous face–vase figure.
Simply stating that determining the figure-ground assignment is the very first thing people do when they direct their gaze, new things come into view and our brains need a basis upon which to make sense of things. We have to determine which elements are figures (requiring immediate concern and attention) and which are ground (not so important right now, but do provide context).
This process is of vital importance to humans and likely has its evolutionary basis in threat detection. For example: am I walking on just leaves or am I about to step on a rattlesnake? It also ensures that we are able to prioritize our perception so we don’t go banging into things accidentally or ignore something of immediate proximity and importance. Our perception of the figure ground relationship allows us to organize what we see by how each object relates to others. The short and sweet version is, it allows us to determine what we’re supposed to look at and what we might safely ignore.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary;jsessionid=A4543B59A2ECF8BAA34FAB29F972DB72?doi=10.1.1.99.5612
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12049239
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v4/n9/full/nn0901-857.html
Terminology: Sensation, perception, sense, processing, recognition, depth, brain, contour, figure-ground assignment, Edgar Rubin, Rubin vase effect, surroundedness, Gestalt, Gestalt School, visual perception, psychologist, perceptual, phenomenologist, vision, brain, processes, regions, studies, detection, proximity, elements, figures, shaping, senses, perceptual experience.
1a) State what your topic is.
The Middle find vision
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
this topic relates to this chapter because it explains many different dimensions of how things are coded together, how we connect information to make sense to us, how we can tell a difference between two opposite objects or similarities on more similar objects. how Gestalt school of psychologist did many research on this topic and many other more too.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
i'm very interested in this topic particularly because i find it very appealing to me, how it was explained by the authors was well understood, the examples that were used were explicit, the research that was done was very well put together, i also how it goes into details very small details on how certain part of our visual system work together, how little pieces or different parts of cells work together to do such an indescribable to make sure that our brain is doing what it's supposed be doing, middle vision is one of our very most precious parts of our visual system because it goes directly the center of your retina.
2.share your findings
as i was reading one of my articles, i came across a finding that was stating processing of losing your middle vision. there are two different types of how you can lose your middle vision and i thought this was very interesting because it was educating me as well as i was doing it, first one is :Pathophysiology
Acute loss of vision has 3 general causes:
Opacification of normally transparent structures through which light rays pass to reach the retina (eg, cornea, vitreous)
Retinal abnormalities
Abnormalities affecting the optic nerve or visual pathways
the second one is :Etiology
The most common causes of acute loss of vision are
Vascular occlusions of the retina (central retinal artery occlusion, central retinal vein occlusion)
Ischemic optic neuropathy (often in patients with temporal arteritis)
Vitreous hemorrhage (caused by diabetic retinopathy or trauma)
Trauma
these are very serious illness and the only way to prevent them is to actually get a regular check up, losing your acute visual is something to be really worried about because you have no depth perception of what a center target for an object is.
as i was watching a youtube video on this particular topic, i actually got to see where the "middle" part of your vision is located, yes it was described in the book but the video actually goes through details as if it was an object we're looking at in 3D effect. another thing that i came across to was the descriptive of the middle visual, but it was explained in away where other parts of the visual systems were involved and there were visual explanations on how all of it connects to one another.
overall i thought this chapter was one of the most interesting chapters yet, i enjoyed reading the whole thing and i wish that more chapters on this book were like this one.
TERMS: Cortex, middle visual system, ganglions, pathways, neuropaths, central retina, retinopaths, brain functions
http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/eye_disorders/symptoms_of_ophthalmologic_disorders/acute_vision_loss.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni6RjkjdQyk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cortex
I chose to do visual agnosia. The chapter discusses agnosia, what it is, and talks a little about the basics. I think its interesting because you think theres blind people, and people who can see, you never think of the people who can technically see but have no idea what they are looking at.
There are two types of visual agnosia, apperceptive and associative. Apperceptive agnosia is when you cannot tell what something is because you have a hard time making out shapes, seeing the lines of where things end. You can't know it is a square if you can't see the edges, so it may look like a circle. This happens because of a lesion in the occipital lobe or the posterior temporal lobe. Associative agnosia is when you can see shapes just fine, but you brain does not connect it to the correct word in your brain. The part of your cortex that associates names with what you see, is not working properly. Associative agnosia breaks down to two subtypes, achromatopsia and prosopagnosia. achromatopsia is the inability to see/recognize colors. prosopagnosia is when someone cannot recognize faces, it could be someone they know super well and all the sudden they don't know them at all. They know them, but cannot put a name to it.
TERMS: Visual agnosia, associative, cortext, lesions, achromatopsia, prosopagnosia, apperceptive, associative,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_agnosia
http://www.dana.org/Publications/GuideDetails.aspx?id=49987
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze8VVtBgK7A
For this week’s assignment, I chose to do a little more research on ambiguous figures. Ambiguous figures are defined figure(s) that generate(s) two or more plausible interpretations. The most common of these figures are the Necker Cube, the Duck-Rabbit, the Never-Ending Staircase, the Old/Young Woman, etc. Out of this chapter, I found this information to be the most interesting.
Starting my research for this topic was a bit more complicated than I anticipated. Most of the information I received was simply the examples of the tests, and not so much on how our brains and visual system interprets this information. After spending much time filtering out the examples and some really useful information, I came across a few websites that give really good information about the research that scientists are actively seeking.
A question that is wreaking havoc among scientists and researchers is: How can our percept spontaneously change while the observed object stays unchanged? This happens with ambiguous figures, like the Necker cube. Explanations tend favor two notions; bottom–up factors in early visual processing, or top–down factors near awareness. The bottom-up factor approach assumes the perceptual reversal results from ‘passive’ adaptation early in the visual stream. The top-down factor approach emphasizes attentional or expectational factors, acting in a centrally governed ‘active’ decision process near awareness and consequently later in the visual hierarchy. The EEG has a high temporal resolution, so event related potentials (ERPs) may help to throw light on these alternative explanations. However, the precise point in time of neural correlates of perceptual reversal is difficult to estimate. In the beginning of this blog I gave a definition and an example of ambiguous figures. One website I found puts that formal definition into a more “lay” explanation; Ambiguous figures (the Necker cube or the drawing “Old/Young Woman”) are static pictures, which strikingly change their appearance during prolonged viewing: a sudden and unavoidable “mental switch” occurs whenever two or more interpretations of a given picture are equally likely.
Along with the bottom-up and top-down approaches, we have to be fully aware of the accidental viewpoint. An accidental viewpoint is a single visual position that produces an ambiguous image. The accidental viewpoint does not provide enough information to distinguish what the object is. Often, this image is perceived incorrectly and produces an illusion that differs from reality. For example, an image may be split in half, with the top half being enlarged and placed further away from the perceiver in space. This image will be perceived as one complete image from only a single viewpoint in space, rather than the reality of two separate halves of an object. Street artists often use tricks of point-of-view to create 2-dimensional scenes on the ground that appear 3-dimensional.
The visual system can also aid itself in resolving ambiguities by detecting the pattern of texture in an image. This is accomplished by using many of the Gestalt principles. The texture can provide information that helps to distinguish whole objects, and the changing texture in an image reveals which distinct objects may be part of the same group. When a region of texture completely surrounds another region of texture, it is likely the background. Additionally, the smaller regions of texture in an image are likely the figure. Along the lines of texture, camouflage uses ambiguous images to hide the real world. In nature, camouflage is used by organisms to escape predators. This is achieved through creating an ambiguity of texture segmentation by imitating the surrounding environment. Without being able to perceive noticeable differences in texture and position, a predator will be unable to see their victim.
After reading through multiple, reliable sources of information, my eyes are now open even more to discovering how our visual system is able to process and determine what is important and what is not. Much of our “importance” thinking is based on our memories. The processes that lead up to creating that particular memory is starting to take shape. It is very interesting learning about the underlying causes of our visual system.
References:
http://sites.sinauer.com/wolfe3e/chap4/ambiguityF.htm I chose this website because it gave interactional examples of each of the cases of ambiguous figures.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698904005152 I chose the website because it gave a breakdown of the certain types of ambiguity perceived.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_image I chose this website because it gave more of an easy explanation to get my head around what the processes actually are. Plus it gave great visual examples.
Terms: Ambiguous figures, the Necker Cube, the Duck-Rabbit, the Never-Ending Staircase, the Old/Young Woman, bottom-up, top-down, perceptual reversal, ‘passive’ adaptation, EEG, event related potentials (ERPs), accidental viewpoint, illusion, viewpoint, visual system, Gestalt principles, texture
I choose to research the topic of the extra striate body area or EBA as mentioned in the book. I choose to research this because it was an area of the brain that I had not heard of before and I wanted to find out more about it. I have heard that our brains have a map of our own bodies that stretches across it, but I hadn’t heard of this area that perceives body parts. I also didn’t really think our brain was set up in a way where different areas only perceive certain things.
The EBA is an area of the brain that perceives human body parts. Kanwisher and her associates first identified it in 2001. In her original study subjects were shown images of human body parts along with other images of animal body parts and faces. The EBA only showed activation when the body parts were shown, and showed even more activity when an entire human body was shown. It did not have activity when animal parts or human faces were shown. This indicates that it is a specialized area of the brain that only perceives human body parts. Although her study identified this as being a part of the EBA another article I read related the activation when perceiving the entire body to the FBA, a close cousin to the EBA.
In addition to this, she did further research by disrupting the EBA’s communication pathways with a transcranial magnetic stimulation device. This disruption led to a slower reaction in perception and activation of the EBA when showed the same human body part images.
The EBA is thought to integrate it’s information with other areas of the brain in order to understand social situations when you are interacting with others. One study however, found that the EBA couldn’t identify signals of pain in others by identifying parts of the body that are injured or seem to be in pain. The EBA does not play a part in this type of recognition, rather simply identifying that it is a human body part. When images of hands that were being penetrated with needles and those without the needle were shown, there was no difference in activity in the EBA. This is important because recently this has been a common theory about the EBA. It is thought that it may be able to identify things like posture however that may help when integrated with other perceptions of a situation. Specifically it is believed that it interacts with the insula and temporal regions of the brain to create plans of action based on perception of body parts etc.
Terms: temporal region, insula, extra striate body area, perception
Sources:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3205482/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrastriate_body_area
http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/10/2369.full
1a) For my topic I decided to go with the Feed Forward Process.
1b) This relates back to the chapter because it is a term that was used in a few paragraphs to help show some of the visual functions that the brain is responsible for while working with the eyes.
1c) This part was interesting to me because I had already discussed this at one point in my cognitive psychology class that I took last year. It reminds me of when we think of just a general cat we can picture it in our minds, but there are so many different types and breeds that they vary a lot. Even though there are many different kinds of cats we are still able to tell one if we see it, even if we never saw that exact cat before.
2) The term Feed Forward process was coined in 1956 through work done by D. M. Mackay. His work was done mostly with biological control theories and would later contribute this term into the psychology world. The Feed Forward process carries out things like object recognition one neural step after another without feedback from a later stage to an earlier stage. This process explains why we are able to come up with an “animal” signal from a wide range of animals in different positions, shapes, and sizes. Also whenever we deal with Feed Forward we get Feedback as well. For example if a child is shown a cat for the first time this is their new image of that animal, so the feedback would be all the characteristics that it notices, the shape, softness, scent, and different features of the cat. Now when shown another cat that is of a different color this enacts the child’s Feed Forward process making them realize that this is a cat without even touching it. Simply by seeing this new cat they are able to assume it is the same creature as the one before even though they are different colors. With the feedback we can determine with a new object is not the same as one we have seen before, for instance if the same child now sees a dog then the feedback would help them notice the differences of that dog from the cat and thus learns they are not the same. We also use this process in other sciences and mathematics fields. When looking at it from a math perspective we see it more as a problem solving process. We can see Feed Forward being used in behavior changes too. People can also be coached in some cases to learn more desirable behaviors. The way Feed Forward works is by using a neural network. When dealing with just Feed Forward the information moves in only one direction, forward, from the input nodes, through the hidden nodes and to the output nodes. If Feedback is involved then the network is two way.
3) control theories, feed forward, feedback, object recognition, features and characteristics.
4)http://www.bgu.ac.il/chem_eng/pages/Courses/oren%20courses/Chapter_9.pdf This website was interesting because it showed the problem solving process and how feed forward and feedback help with mathematical equations. It was also easy to understand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlVZiZob37I This video clip is an example of the coaching methods that incorporate the Feed Forward process to give a better understanding of that part of my research.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608007002730 This study explains how both feedback and feed forward work together to gather information and was very useful to my research. It is a bit difficult to read because it is full of scientific terms that even I had a hard time processing.
1. A) My topic is agnosia.
B) This topic relates to this chapter because it is about difficulties recognizing things that a person sees.
C) I am interested in this because I wanted to learn how someone with this would cope.
2. Agnosia is a very rare deficiencies. It is the when a person is unable to recognize or interpret anything within a visual field. Agnosia has nothing to do with memory or language. "You see everything but recognize nothing." If a person has this then all of the images in their head will be jumbled or mixed up and they will be misinterpreted in their head.
Agnosia can result from things such as strokes, dementia, developmental disorders, and other neurological conditions. Typically though it will result from damage to specific brain areas. These are in the occipital or parietal lobes of the brain.
Unfortunately, at this time there is no known cure for this condition. If agnosia is from a stroke then it will be permanent. If it is a neurological condition then there is the possibility of surgery. Things such as occupational and speech therapy can help improve a persons symptoms. It could also be beneficial to seek supportive care.
3. Terms: Agnosia, Occipital Lobe, Parietal Lobe
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWrD032Z5gc
I used this video because I liked how it explained what it was and I thought getting to see how those with agnosia see images was interesting.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/agnosia/agnosia.htm
I used this site because it had the definition and also said there was no treatment.
http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychpedia/agnosia
I used this site because it was more descriptive with the treatments.
My topic is prosopagnosia.
Prosopagnosia relates to chapter four because it deals with one’s visual system and lack of ability to recognize a person by their face. Sensation and perception are very broad and the visual system is a large key point when understanding sensation and perception.
I wanted to learn more about this because I find it interesting that someone can know somebody for years and have many encounters with them yet not have the ability to recognize their face. I wanted to learn more about how some people get it and they come with this disorder. Another thing that I would like to know is what they actually see if they don’t see the person’s face as it truly is.
Many people know prosopagnosia as face blindness and it refers to a deficit in recognizing a familiar face. Some people only have a mild case of prosopagnosia which only affects the ability to recognize a person by their face but there are others who have deficits that go beyond the face. Some of these things go beyond the recognition of faces as far as other stimuli such as objects and animals. Another form of this is when people have trouble recognizing the general age of other people and even gender. Certain emotional expressions are more difficult to read and many prosopagnosics have trouble with navigation. Many prosopagnosics cope well with this disorder by developing compensatory mechanisms to help them function efficiently in everyday life. Unfortunately it is not as easy for other people with this disorder. Some suffer from relationship difficulties and social interaction as well as depression.
Until recently, many people thought prosopagnosia was a disorder than very few people had. Turns out that is not the case. Not very many people knew about the disorder so when the information came about many people approached researchers around the world for more information. Recent studies have come up with the conclusion that as many as 1 in 50 people have it. It was originally thought of that prosopagnosia was the cause of a stroke or other neurological damage but that is also not always the case. One of the causes of prosopagnosia is from developmental issues when people fail to develop normal face processing abilities. There is recent evidence that part of the issue could come from genetics.
There has also been talk that people with autistic spectrum suffer from face recognition impairments. Some researchers believe that this disorder is a result of lack of social interest and interaction meaning they are not being exposed to the faces of others. Some people may think that they have the disorder of prosopagnosia because they did not recognize a face they were familiar with. People who have this disorder fail to recognize their children and their spouse and many other people they see on a daily basis. What prosopagnosics do to help them with recognizing people is to get familiar with their hairstyle or clothing or knowing the situation in which they will encounter them. However, if they run into this person who they usually run into somewhere else, there is potential that they will fail to recognize that person.
There really is no treatment yet for prosopagnosia but many researchers are working in this field and are working with people to help them with their disorder.
Terms: prosopagnosia, visual system, theory, sensation, perception, interaction
http://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/index/information - I used this website because it was separated into sections that helped me better understand different concepts of prosopagnosia such as coping, effects, causes, treatments and more.
https://www.faceblind.org/research/ - I found this website interesting because it talked about research being done on prosopagnosia along with different research questions they are trying to solve. I like how they are working hard to discover a treatment for this disorder.
http://www.medicinenet.com/face_blindness_prosopagnosia/article.htm - I liked this website because it had a lot of the same information as the other two website which tells me this information that I found is valid and can be supported.
The disorders in the chapters seem to be pretty interesting. I think it is because many of them are so rare and we don’t know a lot about them. This week I decided to look further into the disorder prosopagnosia, or face blindness. I chose this because although I have heard it in passing a few times I’ve never really looked into how this disorder manifests. The text gave a very brief overview of face blindness but just brushed over a definition and a little about the areas affected. I had some more questions about how it occurs, how people cope and what prognosis looks like for those with prosopagnosia.
Prosopagnosia which is sometimes known as face blindness, those affected may recognize a face as a face but not recognize the person by the face. Sounds pretty confusing, but basically a person who has prosopagnosia can know someone but not recognize them by their face. It is a neurological disorder that occurs because of damage in the temporal lobe, specifically the right fusiform gyrus.
There are different types of the disorder, it can occur as the result of a stroke or trauma to the brain, or some are born with the congenital prosopagnosia. For those who are born with the disorder there has been some suggestion that the occurrences seem to occur alongside another disorder on the autism spectrum. However most researchers do not feel that enough studies have been done to make a direct correlation between the disorders.
There are also varying degrees of the disorder from some who can recognize people very close to them like family members to those who cannot recognize anyone, not even parents and siblings. Some cannot even distinguish face as being different than some other object. There really is no formal treatment for this disorder, no medications or special glasses. Treatment is simply doing things to help recognize people with things other than faces, such as clothing type, voice or perhaps a birthmark or other identifying feature.
One of the biggest issues for those who suffer from this is that others do not always understand especially in the beginning. They simply think that the person is rude, uncaring or self-absorbed. It can be detrimental to relationships because it seems as though the person with prosopagnosia is not interested in the other person as he or she can’t even recognize the other person.
In one article the actor Brad Pitt says that he believes he has a prosopagnosia at some level. He went on to describe the struggle he has recognizing people he has met previously some many times. His position as an actor leads many to judge him as very self-absorbed and he said many people are highly offended when he does not recognize them. I did not find anything that said whether or not he was ever formally diagnosed but people do say that he is helping to raise some awareness for the disorder that often gets little recognition.
Many people who experience this after injury do so after a stroke, making it a little easier for them as family and friends expect that stroke victims will have some lingering effects. Although it does still create difficulties in relationships as time goes on. For those born with the disorder they have varying levels of understanding, especially as they get older and begin to have broader social circles. The disorder does cause some of those affected to become socially isolated, as not being able to recognize people creates problems in developing relationships.
Studying this further was a little frustrating and somewhat disheartening as there is not a lot of information about the disorder other than about it. I really felt for the people who have this with not a lot of help or real hope for treatment or improvement. Many of the sites did stress that there are research projects currently underway with links if someone was interested in participating. The other information that is blaringly missing is that I found no numbers in regard to how many people suffer from prosopagnosia. There was one site that had a face recognition test that I was able to take I missed two of the faces but they were two that I was not very familiar with, the test stated that I probably did not suffer from the disorder. I do think it would be very interesting to hear from someone with the disorder, to hear how he or she copes and what life is like on a daily basis.
http://www.medicinenet.com/face_blindness_prosopagnosia/article.htm I chose this site because it had several pages of information as well as comments from people with prosopagnosia
http://www.medpagetoday.com/CelebrityDiagnosis/39420 This article was about Brad Pitt’s claim of having prosopagnosia.
http://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/ This site is set up for people with the disorder and had information about research and links for other sites
http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/index.php This site had the facial recognition test.
Terms: prosopagnosia, temporal lobe, right fusiform gyrus, neurological, congenital prosopagnosia, brain trauma,
My topic is contours.It is discussed directly in the chapter, and i just wanted to learn a little bit more about it, research going an and done before.
I think it’s cool how the visual system goes beyond what information is presented in the environment to form edges around objects to identify what they are. The occasional lack of an edge on an object doesn’t hinder a person’s visual system. Sometimes it may actually be difficult to even see the gap in the edge, because your visual system and then brain fill in the gaps without you even realizing it.
An Italian psychologist, Gaetano Kanizsa, investigated stimuli that were missing edges and how the visual system still perceived the object correctly. Kanizsa is known for his image of the perceived triangle with the three pacman-looking objects. Below is a link to example of illusory contours. Edges that are perceived despite lack of physical evidence for them are called illusory contours. An Illusory contour is a contour that’s perceived, despite a lack of changes from one side of the contour to the other in the image. They were discovered by Friedrich Schumann around 1900.
This concept leads into good continuation, a rule developed by the Gestalt school of thought. The Gestalt law of "good continuation" has been used to describe a variety of phenomena demonstrating the importance of continuity in human perception. Two visible bits of an edge will actually make it easier to perceive a third collinear segment that lies between them, even if that middle segment isn’t visible. Two elements will tend to group together if they seem to lie on the same contour.
http://www.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient&aq=f&oq=illusory+contours&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADFA_enUS426US428&q=illusory+contours&gs_upl=0l0l0l6490lllllllllll0&aqi=g4g-v1&oi=image_result_group&sa=X
This just shows a variety of illusionary images, and if you look at it closely your brain starts to fill in the missing pieces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_contours
Just a bit of background on it.
http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/science/article/pii/004269899390156Q
I didn't read the entire 20 some pages but I got the jist of it. Got it through the rod library.
1a) My topic is prosopagnosia.
1b) This relates to the chapter because it is an impairment in the way we as people perceive and recognize what we see around us. I am interested in it because disorders are usually what grabs my attention. I find the usual quite boring, so I seek out what is different or abnormal.
2) Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder that can be caused by genetic factors as well as brain injuries. This disorder refers to the inability of a person to recognize the faces that they see. They may be able to tell that what they are seeing is a face, but they will not be able to tell whom that face belongs to.
This is a relatively newly found disorder, with its first case after World War II when a couple of soldiers sustaining head injuries were unable to recognize their wives and families. Even with this, it took fifty more years to find out that the condition could be genetic. Cases like those are often difficult to diagnose due to the fact that people born with prosopagnosia do not realize they have it until testing is done. In either method of attaining the disorder, it is believed that the part of the brain where the problem is located is called the right fusiform gyrus. This is thought to control the neuro-systems involved with facial perception and memory.
There are many social implications of this disorder. The inflicted cannot even recognize their own family members, much less people at work, school, or any other area of life. This can cause feelings to be hurt, which may damage relationships. Due to this, some experts believe that prosopagnosia is many times present in in children with mild autism. This would most certainly have a hand in their social impairments. The only treatment at present time is to develop coping mechanisms for those with the disorder. For example, they must learn to rely on recognizing people through hair, walking style, clothing and so on. While this is a fragile system, as people can often change these things, it is a step in the right direction.
Terms: Prosopagnosia; neurological; genetic; right fusiform gyrus; facial perception; mild autism
Sources:
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm
http://www.medicinenet.com/face_blindness_prosopagnosia/article.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxqsBk7Wn-Y
1a) My topic for this blog is prosopagnosia.
1b) This topic relates to the chapter because it is an impairment in the way we, as people, perceive and recognize who and what we see around us. When we are not able to recognize faces, this means that an important part of our perceptual abilities is compromised. I am interested in it because disorders in general tend to hold my interest. I find that I am better able understand how a properly working system works when a disorder of the system is explained. It puts things into perspective for me. I am also interested in prosopagnosia because of the emotional side effects of the disorder. I cannot imagine going through life without being able to recognize those close to me.
2) Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder of the brain. This disorder describes the to the inability of a person to recognize the faces that they see. This means they would not be able to recognize their own family members. They still are able to see the face, but they see it only as a collection of features. The part of the brain that is able to perceive the collection of features as a specific person has been shut off. Prosopagnosia can be caused by genetic factors, as well as some brain injuries. Injuries that could cause the disorder are strokes, disease, and trauma to the brain.
This is a relatively new found disorder. The first recorded case was shortly after the end of World War II when a couple of soldiers sustained head injuries. Due to those injuries, they became unable to recognize the faces of their wives and families. Even after the studies involved in this case, it took fifty more years to discover that the condition could be caused by genetic mutations and deletions. Cases of prosopagnosia that are congenital are often difficult to diagnose due to the fact that people born with prosopagnosia do not realize they have the disorder until some type of testing is done. For both genetic and non-genetic cases of prosopagnosia, it is believed that source of the problem is located in a part of the brain called the right fusiform gyrus. This is fold in the brain is thought to control the neurological-systems involved with facial perception and memory.
There are many social implications of this disorder. The inflicted cannot even recognize their own family members, much less people at work, school, or any other area of life. This can cause feelings to be hurt, as well as other social faux pas, which may damage relationships. For example, if someone with prosopagnosia were to see a friend on the street, they would not recognize the friend. Therefore, the one with this disorder would most likely fail to acknowledge their friend in anyway. If the friend was not aware of the disorder or did not fully understand its implications, that friend may be upset and hurt at not being acknowledged. Due to this effect of social difficulty, some experts believe that prosopagnosia is many times present in in children with mild autism. This would most certainly have a hand in the social impairments associated with any form of autism. The only treatment at the present time for prosopagnosia is to work on the development of coping mechanisms for those with the disorder. They must find various ways to compensate for their perceptual deficiencies. For example, they must learn to rely on recognizing people through hair, walking style, clothing and so on. Sadly, this is a fragile system for figuring out who is who. Features like hairstyle, clothing, and perhaps even a person’s gait are not always constant. When someone changes any of these defining qualities, those with prosopagnosia are essentially back to square one. Yet, people are able to get by. Hopefully, as more research is conducted on the disorder, better methods for treatment and coping may be discovered.
Terms: Prosopagnosia; neurological; congenital; genetic; deletion; mutation; deficiencies; compensation; right fusiform gyrus; facial perception; mild autism; treatment; perceptual; facial perception
Sources:
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm
I chose this source because it was a relatively simple description of prosopagnosia. With this, I was able to gain a basic understanding in a simple manner and this provided a foundation for me to build upon with more knowledge.
http://www.medicinenet.com/face_blindness_prosopagnosia/article.htm
I chose this source because it was a slightly more in depth source of this disorder. It also included comments made by those with the disorder. This allowed me to gain a first hand perspective of what it is like to have prosopagnosia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxqsBk7Wn-Y
I chose this source because it looked to be a reliable video on the subject. I like videos because hearing something makes it easier for me to understand something. I also liked this video because it gave some background information on the history of prosopagnosia.
My topic is object recognition. It interests me because recognition is the most basic aspects of our daily lives – we see things, we process them, and we recognize them. We do not give second thoughts to the process of recognizing things, which it why this topic is appealing – I want to learn about things that we take for granted. This topic relates to the chapter because it discusses the higher level of processing which applies attributes to what the retina perceives.
OBJECT RECOGNITION, AGNOSIA, AND PROSOPAGNOSIA
We recognize different things every day and are barely aware of the process of recognizing: we can recognize things from different angles, in different contexts, of different shapes, sizes and formats, and we never question the process that took place. However, when encountering abnormalities, we learn something about the normality. In the case of recognition, we learn about object and face recognition when studying agnosia and prosopagnosia.
Scientists and theorists have come up with theories of objection recognition. The basic stages of object recognition involves seeing and processing basic components of the objects, then these components are grouped together and figure-ground assignment steps in to segregate background and target object. What we see is then matched with what we store in our consciousness. The process then applies some attributes to the match, and we recall the meaning of the object, then recognition is formed.
However, object recognition can get a lot more complicated than just the steps described above. Two early theories, template matching and feature analysis, suggested that we match what we see with a set of templates that were previously stored in our brain, and that we look for features that make things what they are, respectively. But these two theories only apply to two dimensional objects, and we live in a three dimensional world, thus most things we recognize daily are three dimensional.
Another theory, called recognition by components, proposes that we extract parts, or geons, from the objects we see. Geons can include simple volumes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and wedges. This theory also assumes that the brain stores structural discription, which describes specific relationships between the geons for every object. When the geons and their interrelations match the structural descriptions, we recognize the objects.
View dependent recognition provides an easier explanation. It suggests that we store mental images of the objects we have seen, and when what we see matches the mental images, we recognize it. This theory seems too simple to many scientists, but it has ambient supportive experimental evidence (K.I.S.S, keep it simple, stupid).
The processing of visual recognition is typically viewed as a bottom up process, where information is received at the lower level processors (visual cortex) and then passed to the upper level processors (inferotemporal cortex). Theory of vision by David Marr stresses only the bottom up process of recognition, in which the images captured by the retina is set upwards to higher leveled processes that analyze the images.
As opposed to bottom up, Moshe Bar proposed that visual object recognition is actually a top down process. In the process Bar described, images are partially analyzed in the early visual cortex before getting set to the IT. The shortcut of visual analyze can minimize the standard descriptions needed to facilitate object recognition.
What can we learn from object agnosia and prosopagnosia? Object agnosia is an inability to recognize objects, but people who suffer from this have no problem recognizing faces. When these patients are shown art pieces with hidden faces, they report seeing the faces but remained unable to recognize the objects. Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is the inability recognize people’s face, however these patients are able to recognize objects without difficulties. Why are agnosics able to recognize faces and prosopagnosics able to recognize objects? Does that indicate object recognition and face recognition acquire different brain processing?
Some studies have been able to prove that face recognition might possess a different processing from object recognition. Infants of 30 minutes old are shown to have the abilities to track moving faces. However some research have proved otherwise – a significant number of prosopagnosics show the inability to recognize some non-faced objects. These prosopagnosics when trained to recognize non-faced objects, they use face recognition processes to do so.
TERMS: prosopagnosia, agnosia, bottom up, top down, recognition by components, visual object recognition, geons, figure ground assignment, structural description, templates, feature analysis, view dependent, template matching
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_neuroscience_of_visual_object_recognition
Wikipedia showed me different theories regarding visual object recognition. Although it is very hard to read, I learned an incredible amounts from this sight, and thus able to decide what other supplementary resources I needed for this blog post.
http://www.pigeon.psy.tufts.edu/avc/kirkpatrick/#RBC
This website focuses on RBC. Although I do not think this theory is as accurate as other simpler ones, the website helped me understand the basics and reasoning of this theory. Everything is described in a tremendous amount of details.
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/psych115s/notes/lecture9/
This website is the one I found the most useful so far. It allows me to learn about some basic, but important concepts of visual object recognition. The bullet points really helped getting to the main points of the topic.
http://www.class.uh.edu/phil/garson/IMNotes8.htm
This website did not help much, but it allowed me to understand David Marr’s theory better. There is a lot of extra details that I do not need, but it never hurts to read more than necessary.
1a. The concept from chapter four that I chose to focus on is the phenomena known as Congenital Prosopagnosia. It is characterized as a form of face blindness that is present at birth. Face blindness specifically means that individuals with cognitive prosopagnosia are able to see human faces but are not able to recognize when a face belongs to someone they know. Although it is a devastating disorder it has been really beneficial to developing research suggesting that there is a specific neural module for face recognition that is present at birth.
1b. The topic of Congenital Prosopagnosia relates to chapter five because it gives a physiological example of a deficit in the visual system that dramatically effects the ability to perceive and recognize objects. The rest of the chapter demonstrates the parts of the visual cortex that work together to give us the ability to correctly recognize and perceive object such as lines, edges, and faces of those that we are familiar with. The ability to recognize lines and edges aids us in not bumping into sharp or dangerous items and recognizing faces is important for the development of normal social interactions and development.
1c. I am very interested in this topic because it is a deficit in the visual system at birth that drastically effects the rest of a persons life. It does not have a notable cure at this point and it is also unclear what the direct causes of it are. I am always interested in physiological disorders as they appear in different parts of the human body. It is sad but also incredible that one small aspect of the visual system malfunctioning could have such an impact on the ability to recognize people for the rest of our lives. I am excited to look at research to learn exactly what it is, if it has a high rate of heritability, and what the general findings have been.
2. An article by Rivolta et al sought to look at the difference between overt congenital prosopagnosia and covert congenital prosopagnosia. They found that covert awareness is the phenomena of recognition without awareness through measuring behavioral and electrophysiological responses even with the absence of conscious recognition. On the other hand overt congenital prosopagnosia refers to the conscious ability to recognize faces explicitly until you acquire brain damage that destroys the brains ability to make these conscious recognitions. This relates to the topic of CP because it explains the variations that occur and the different effects it has on the visual system. It is extremely useful to be aware of these differences because it can be used to determine what parts of the neural modules in the visual system are malfunctioning and causing such a devastating phenomenon. Another article by Johnen et al found evidence that suggests congenital prosopagnosia is heritable because it is present at birth and without the presence of brain damage. The study specifically looked at a family with a father and two sons who met criteria for congenital prosopagnosia. After diagnosis the rest of the immediate and available distant family were tested on their visuosperceptual skills and were all found to be deficient in all aspects. This finding suggests that the gene for CP is continuous and effects all members of a family to different degrees. The findings in this article demonstrate the hypothesis that congenital prosopagnosia has a genetic component because it is present at birth and without any damage to the brain after birth. This is an interesting finding because it may be possible to target a gene or group of genes that contribute to the development of CP in utero for a cure or possible treatment option. A third article by Rivolta et al found further evidence to support the finding of covert CP. Individuals in the present study were not able to explicitly identify familiar faces but were able to implicitly show face recognition. This evidence shows an interesting pattern in individuals with CP and their ability to unconsciously recognize a human face. It is possible that these findings will aid in further understanding of the deficit and to treatment options. I think it would be very interesting to look for a gene(s) associated with the deficit and then use comparative research to perform gene knock out tests to examine the effects of the absence of the gene causing CP.
Terms: Congenital prosopagnosia, face blindnes, perception, covert, overt recognition
http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=2064c39b-80d9-4fec-bdc6-d78e11e0d2d5%40sessionmgr115&hid=109&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=psyh&AN=2013-19874-001 - I chose this article because it gave a good explanation of CP and the presence of covert CP in participants who took part in a study to examine the presence of face recognition deficits.
http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=b8220c01-b1f1-4ebc-bed8-abac527db546%40sessionmgr111&hid=109&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=psyh&AN=2014-20920-006 - I chose this article because it is a very interesting study that suggests a genetic marker for CP. It was easy to follow and the results of visual deficits within the entire family is useful for future research into this area.
http://web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=63baeaa5-3de8-477d-9946-81ed93b3e792%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4212&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=psyh&AN=2012-02766-009 - I chose this website because it gave further evidence for the ability of individuals with CP to unconsciously and covertly recognize human faces. It is a very interesting phenomena that suggests CP patients can unconsciously recognize the human face without realizing it. Consciously CP patients are unable to recognize any aspect of the human face. This finding is consistent and interesting to read about.
1a) Prosopagnosia
1b) This topic relates to the chapter because the chapter was about the brains ability to recognize objects and this disorder is the lack of the ability to recognize faces.
1c) I chose this topic because of its assumed rarity. I want to know more about the disorder’s treatment options and the specific traits that allows for diagnosis.
2) Prosopagnosia, or “facial blindness,” is characterized by the inability to recognize faces. There are different degrees to which this disorder takes this ability away. Milder cases allow the patients to memorize a small group of faces, but they still have a harder time trying to recognize the vast majority of the people in their lives. In the most extreme cases, individuals do not even recognize their own faces. Time Magazine reported of a woman, Cecilia Burman, who talks about how people view her because of her disorder. She says that she has lost new friends because of her inability to recognize them in public. Time also reports of a 40 year old homemaker, Gaylen Howard, who cannot even recognize her own face in the mirror. She says that she often “makes funny faces in public bathrooms” because she does not know which face is hers.
Terry Sweeney, a professional photographer, had an accident when serving as a fire fighter and now has the disorder. In the video that I watched, she was taking pictures of her own mother. They later showed her with a researcher who was trying to see if she could recognize the face of her mother. She laid out five pictures and only allowed for Sweeney to see the faces of the women in the pictures. Sweeney was unable to recognize any of the faces that were put in front of her, but when she was allowed to see the entirety of the photos, she was able to recognize her mother based on the clothes that she was wearing. Later in the video, you see Sweeney as she is shown slides of different famous people including Ronald Reagan, Bruce Springsteen, and Marilyn Monroe. She was unable to recognize any of the faces. The last picture she was shown was a photo of herself. She could not even recognize her own face.
In a study that I looked at, done by Dr. Thomas Gruter from the Institute of Human Genetics in Munster, 17 of the 689 subjects who were surveyed were determined to have the disorder. Of those 17 subjects, 14 reported that they had at least on close relative who suffered from the same disorder. From this pattern of inheritance, Gruter concluded that the disorder may be caused by a defect in a single, dominant gene that is passed down from a parent. The child has a 50% chance of inheriting this disorder.
From further research, I found that prosopagnosia can result from a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or certain neurodegenerative diseases. This means that it can be caused by a certain experience that damaged the brain or just simply inherited through a disease at birth. Treatment options are very slim. Patients are encouraged to live with the disease and learn to cope by learning to find different clues, besides the face of course, to recognize individuals.
3) Key terms: Prosopagnosia, Facial blindness, disorder, recognize, inheritance, defect, gene, brain
4) http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1211572-1,00.html
I chose this website because it offered multiple, real examples of this disorder. It also provided a study for reference, and helped me understand how it applies to the people who suffer from the disorder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCrxomPbtY
I chose this video because it was a case example of how it affected someone in their daily life. It was interesting to actually see the disorder take effect in Terry Sweeney’s own reactions.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm
I chose this website because it cited the specifics of the disorder, and also gave me the available treatment options available.
My topic is prosopagnosia. It relates to the chapter, because it is a deficiency in the brain's ability to perceive the world around it to the full extent that it should be able to. I am very interested in this topic, because as someone who has not experienced this condition, it is hard for me to imagine what it would be like to live with it. There is no way, as far as I am aware, for someone that does not have this disorder to experience what it is like to look at a face you have known your entire life and not be able to recognize it, even if you know who it is.
Prosopagnosia, or more commonly referred to as face blindness, is a cognitive disorder where the brain's ability to recognize faces is impaired. It is essentially sensation without perception. This condition can arise from either acute brain damage or a person may be born with it. Approximately 2.5% of the population is afflicted with the congenital form of this disorder. Prosopagnosia is usually associated with the fusiform gyrus. This is the section of the brain that is activated specifically in response to faces. The fusiform gyrus is what allows us to see faces in greater detail than similarly complex inanimate objects. That is why when this part of the brain becomes damaged, one may have trouble recognizing the finer details of someone's face. There are varying degrees of prosopagnosia. While many with this disorder only have trouble recognizing individual faces, others report deficits in other aspects of facial processing, such as not being able to judge age, gender, emotional expressions, or the direction of a person's eye gaze. Still others find that their troubles extend to not being able to recognize other stimuli, such as inanimate objects or animals. The varying degree of one's condition puts them into one of two types of acquired prosopagnosia: apperceptive and associative. Apperceptive prosopagnosia is the more serious of the two. People with this type are unable to make any sense of faces whatsoever and are unable to make comparing/contrasting judgments when presented with pictures of different faces. They are unable to recognize both familiar and unfamiliar faces. Associative Prosopagnosia, on the other hand, is less severe. People with this type may be able to say whether pictures of people's faces are the same or different from one another. They may also be able to tell the age and sex of a person by their face. However, they may still not be able to identify these people or provide any information about them, such as their names, jobs, or when they were encountered. This shows that people with this form of prosopagnosia can make sense of some face information but not all. It is impossible for someone that does not suffer from this condition to truly understand what it is like living with it. People afflicted with prosopagnosia can easily become very frustrated with not being able to recognize even loved ones. They may even feel as though they have lost an important connection to those loved ones, because they literally cannot put a face to them, making them seem as though they are less personified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia - I used this source, because it provided a greater amount of information than most other sites that I could find, while still presenting that information in a very organized and easy to comprehend manner.
http://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/index/information - I used this website, because it presented the information in a very well organized fashion. The site is also from a current research lab dedicated specifically to the topic, so the information was both accurate and up to date.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCrxomPbtY - I used this source, because it showed how difficult it is for people living with the disorder. It went beyond the facts presented on a page and presented it in a humanized fashion.
Terms: Prosopagnosia, Face Blindness, Fusiform Gyrus, Apperceptive Prosopagnosia, Associative Prosopagnosia, Perception, Sensation, Recognition
1. The topic I picked to explore further was Pandemonium Architecture. Pandemonium Architecture relates to the chapter because the text briefly covered this topic, though the book did seem to gloss over it very quickly. I am interested in it because I was an education major for 2 years and never heard of this idea, so that made me suspicious it was outdated enough to not be relevant or even correct anymore.
2. The Pandemonium Architecture, also known as Pandemonium Model, is an early theory that tried to explain the process of letter recognition in learning readers and those who have known to read for years based on the Bottom-Up Process. This model was published by Oliver Selfridge in 1957 or 1959. The sources I found were split on the original publication date, but the book has the date as 1959 so that is what I will use as the publication date. This theory is a based on the idea that there are four types of “demons” that do very different but important jobs in the metal process the primary visual cortex does it while tries to recognize letters. The four types of “demons” are: Feature Demons, Cognitive Demon, Decision Demon, and Image Demon. Feature Demon has the job of looking at the features of the letter. For example, when the feature demons look at an “Á”, they look at the individual elements of the letter (the apex, arms, and crossbar). Then the Feature Demons wake up the Cognitive demons who decided whether they think it an “A, X or H” by yelling to the Decision Demon. The Decision Demon then decides the whole if the letter looks like an “A” by listening to the Cognitive Demon and sends that message along. Of course, there are no “demons” inside the brains of humans, the demons are just a “highly entertaining” conceptualization (plus the picture of the demons in the book is super adorable). Image Demons use individual lines and spaces to analyses and recognize the image (an example being a red barn).
But let’s return to the Pandemonium Model. This is why it is very important that when a person is learning to read, the font should be clear, and the same font all the way through the learning process. The Roman alphabet is the font that is thought to be the best font to use with this system as it minimizes overlap error. This makes the model work better as it becomes more efficient the more time it has to learn the differences between letters, and then eventually the learn the same letters in different, more complicated fonts.
The Pandemonium model only works because it operates as a Bottom-up Process. A Bottom-up process has to start with a stimulus because it can be used by anyone. It can be used by anyone because a person’s perception of the object in question, in this case a letter, is data driven. Top-down Processing is the completing process, and works the exact opposite way. Top-down processing happens when a person uses background knowledge to make an educated guess about the object. This led me to questions about how the two different processes may relate to dyslexia (a reading disability that has no intellectual, visual or ovation causes). There are two forms Dyslexia: phonological form of dyslexia and Surface Dyslexia. People with Surface Dyslexia would probably have an easier time using the Bottom-up Model as people with Phonological Dyslexia have an more of an with Bottom-up Processing. That is where Top-down Processing would be helpful to people with both disorders, but more so to people with Phonological Dyslexia, as top-down processing is an example of Interactive Compensatory Processing. This just means that people with dyslexia rely more on context to figure out what the letter in question probably is.
Terms: Pandemonium Architecture, Pandemonium Model, process of letter recognition , Bottom-Up Process, theory, types, “demons” , primary visual cortex Feature Demons, Cognitive Demon, Decision Demon, Image Demon, apex, arms, crossbar, elements , whole, lines , spaces, font, Roman alphabet , overlap, stimulus, perception, object, data driven, Top-down Processing, background knowledge, educated guess, dyslexia, phonological form of, dyslexia , Surface Dyslexia, Interactive Compensatory Processing, context .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemonium_architecture --> I used the site because it provided a lot of background info and gave me lots of points to further explore. I used this site for background information, and the usefulness of the Roman alphabet.
http://sites.sinauer.com/wolfe3e/chap4/pandemoniumF.htm --> I used this website because it used simple, easy to understand concepts. I used this site to experiment with the interactive model and explore which letters would be most likely to be confused.
http://www.typographydeconstructed.com/category/anatomy-of-type/page/2/ I used this site because it explained the parts of letters quickly and simply.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWWrlsfgM0A I used this video because quickly summed up the difference between bottom-up and top-down processing. I used this video because quickly summed up the difference between bottom-up and top-down processing and that related to a source I found on dyslexia and how it related to the bottom-up processing of recognizing letters.
http://www.unc.edu/~joehop/20/finalreview.htm --> I used this site as it clearly defined Dyslexia and explained how the two processes (top-down and bottom-up) could be used in place of/together if needed.
This week for my topical blog I chose to look further into the topic of prosopagnosia. This relates back to t the chapter as we look into deficiency in the brain’s ability to perceive the world around us. This interested me particularly because my favorite class in college has been over different disorders. I think that it is so neat to know more and more about each disorder that people throughout the world potentially face everyday.
Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder when one is not able to recognize faces, it is also known as face blindness, or facial agnosia. The term prosopagnosia comes from many greek words meaning “face” and “lack of knowledge.” This is a disorder that depending on the degree of impairment depends on what the person is unable to see. Some people may only not recognize faces of other important people to them but others may not even be able to recognize their own faces.
It was thought that those who acquire the disorder were those who followed neurological damage, however recently they have found that some people may have just not developed normal face recognition processing abilities despite normal intellectual functions. The only form of treatment is to help the individual come up and develop compensatory strategies to identify individuals.
Some people who have been diagnosed with face blindness, are able to cope well with the face recognition impairment and develop other mechanisms to help them function in their everyday life. But however for others the condition may greatly impact their daily life and lead them to developing other disorders like, depression, social phobia, problems with interpersonal relationships and even major damages to their careers.
In one story a firefighter lost part of her social brain and developed prosopagnosia. After her accident she was not able to recognize any faces not even her own mother. This affected her career and she was no longer able to be a firefighter. They performed a test with pictures that she personally took of her mother and asked her to identify her mother, by only looking at the faces. At this time she was not able to recognize her mother but asked the person conducting the test to see the rest of the clothing. She was then able to pick out her mother as she had developed the skill to recognize people by their clothing rather than their faces.
I think that it would be personally be very hard to cope with the fact that you are no longer be able to know your family by their face or know who just walked into the room. I think that it would be very awkward to have to ask each time who the person was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCrxomPbtY- I liked this video because it gave me a real live perspective of a person who is dealing with these issues everyday and just shows that if she is able to do it then so are many others.
http://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/index/information- this webpage was a great organized webpage that helped break down the information and also seemed really reliable in their information as they talked about past research and present research.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm- this website was short but had a really good deffiinition that was easily understood about the disorder.
terms: prosopagnosia, neurological disorder, face blindness, facial agnosia, intellectual functions, depression, social phobia.
I sent a email to Maclin about it not going through just wanted to post it again on here for the TA's.
1a) State what your topic is.
My topic is over agnosia.
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Agnosia relates to the chapter because it deals with one’s visual system and the lack of ability to recognize a person by their face. It’s also known as “psychic blindness.” A lot of people who have strokes deal with this issue. One part of the temporal lobe, the infernotemporal cortex, effects this part of the visual system. Neurons in the striate cortex are activated by simple stimuli and respond only if their preferred stimuli are presented in very restricted portions of the visual field. But if the cells in the IT cortex have receptive fields, that can spread over the visual field causing problems.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
The reason I’m interested it because I find it interesting that someone would have to ask who they were talking to often because they wouldn’t be able to recognize their face. They could recognize the shape of the face and realize that it’s a person. But they would never be able to tell who that person was without asking. I wanted to learn more about the disorder and how people cope with it. How some people get this and who are more at risk. What they’re actually seeing if they can’t see the actual face.
Agnosia is often accompanied by other types of recognition impairments, which can be place recognition, car recognition, facial expression of emotion, and other impairments. One thing that I found interesting is that a website did divulge into the social aspect of it. Prosopagnosia can create serious social problems. People with this issue can use alternative routes to recognition but they’re not as effective as recognition of the face.
Instead, people with this have to use great reliance on non-facial information such as hair, clothing, voice, and other information. But in different situations like watching a movie, it’s extremely hard for people with this issue to follow what’s going on.
A cause of prosopagnosia has been due to brain damage after suffering a stroke, head trauma, or degenerative diseases. Developmental prosopagnosia can also occur prior to developing face recognition abilities. This is all genetic and occur during the first years of life. These people do not even realize that this is a problem.
There are actually three types of agnosia including visual, auditory, and tactile. People with auditory agnosia still have the ability to detect and make simple judgments about sounds, but they can’t identify the sound sources. People with tactile agnosia are not able to identify an object by touch. They can identify by vision, but by purely touching they can’t identify what objects are.
The only treatment for agnosia is generally symptomatic and supportive. They’re working on trying to find a cure but nothing has been found yet.
Terms: Prosopagnosia, visual system, temporal lobe, infernotemporal cortex, neurons, striate cortex, stimuli, IT cortex, receptive fields, prosopagnosia, visual, auditory, tactile.
URL: http://www.dana.org/Publications/GuideDetails.aspx?id=49987
URL: https://www.faceblind.org/research/
URL: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/agnosia/agnosia.htm
The reason I chose these sites is because they all had valid information on the topic I chose. They all gave me more information on the cause, treatment, and ways to deal with agnosia.
1a) State what your topic is.
My topic is over agnosia.
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Agnosia relates to the chapter because it deals with one’s visual system and the lack of ability to recognize a person by their face. It’s also known as “psychic blindness.” A lot of people who have strokes deal with this issue. One part of the temporal lobe, the infernotemporal cortex, effects this part of the visual system. Neurons in the striate cortex are activated by simple stimuli and respond only if their preferred stimuli are presented in very restricted portions of the visual field. But if the cells in the IT cortex have receptive fields, that can spread over the visual field causing problems.
1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
The reason I’m interested it because I find it interesting that someone would have to ask who they were talking to often because they wouldn’t be able to recognize their face. They could recognize the shape of the face and realize that it’s a person. But they would never be able to tell who that person was without asking. I wanted to learn more about the disorder and how people cope with it. How some people get this and who are more at risk. What they’re actually seeing if they can’t see the actual face.
Agnosia is often accompanied by other types of recognition impairments, which can be place recognition, car recognition, facial expression of emotion, and other impairments. One thing that I found interesting is that a website did divulge into the social aspect of it. Prosopagnosia can create serious social problems. People with this issue can use alternative routes to recognition but they’re not as effective as recognition of the face.
Instead, people with this have to use great reliance on non-facial information such as hair, clothing, voice, and other information. But in different situations like watching a movie, it’s extremely hard for people with this issue to follow what’s going on. A cause of prosopagnosia has been due to brain damage after suffering a stroke, head trauma, or degenerative diseases. Developmental prosopagnosia can also occur prior to developing face recognition abilities. This is all genetic and occur during the first years of life. These people do not even realize that this is a problem.
Agnosias are uncommon. They result from damage to by infarct, tumor, abscess, or trauma, or degeneration of areas of the brain that integrate perception, memory, and identification. Discrete brain lesions can cause different forms of agnosia, which may involve any sense. Typically, only one sense is affected. Examples are hearing, auditory agnosia, the inability to identify objects through sound such as a ringing telephone, taste, gustatory agnosia, smell, olfactory agnosia, touch, tactile agnosia, and sight, visual agnosia.
Other forms of agnosia involve very specific and complex processes within one sense. For example, prosopagnosia is inability to identify well-known faces, including those of close friends, or to otherwise distinguish individual objects among a class of objects, despite the ability to identify generic facial features and objects. Anosognosia often accompanies damage to the right, nondominant parietal lobe. Patients deny their deficit, insisting that nothing is wrong even when one side of their body is completely paralyzed. When shown the paralyzed body part, patients may deny that it is theirs. In an often related phenomenon, patients ignore the paralyzed or desensitized body parts, hemi-inattention, or the space around them, hemineglect. Hemineglect most often involves the left side of the body.
Occipitotemporal lesions may cause an inability to recognize familiar places, environmental agnosia, visual disturbances, visual agnosia, or color blindness, achromatopsia. Right-sided temporal lesions may cause an inability to interpret sounds, auditory agnosia, or may impair music perception, amusia. There are actually three types of agnosia including visual, auditory, and tactile. People with auditory agnosia still have the ability to detect and make simple judgments about sounds, but they can’t identify the sound sources. People with tactile agnosia are not able to identify an object by touch. They can identify by vision, but by purely touching they can’t identify what objects are. The only treatment for agnosia is generally symptomatic and supportive. They’re working on trying to find a cure but nothing has been found yet.
Terms: Prosopagnosia, visual system, temporal lobe, infernotemporal cortex, neurons, striate cortex, stimuli, IT cortex, receptive fields, prosopagnosia, visual, auditory, tactile, complex, parietal lobe, deficit, hemi-inattention, himineglect, occipitotemporal lesions, environmental agnosia, visual disturbances, visual agnosia, color blindness, achromatospai, amusia, touch, vision, tactile agnosia, symptomatic, degenerative disease, olfactory agnosia, stroke, face recognition.
URL: http://www.dana.org/Publications/GuideDetails.aspx?id=49987
URL: https://www.faceblind.org/research/
URL: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/agnosia/agnosia.htm
The reason I chose these sites is because they all had valid information on the topic I chose. They all gave me more information on the cause, treatment, and ways to deal with agnosia.
Gestalt theory
The main translation of this view is often times mistranslated. “The whole is other (not greater) than the sum of its parts.” When I first learned about this I was confused a little but after further reading this correction helped me view the idea in a new perspective. Gestalt theory is the idea that the whole mind has a reality that is independent from its parts. The Gestalt effect is our brains ability to form “whole” perceptions instead of the perception of all the details and parts. This concept is easily applied to the visual system. We don’t see a chair for its multiple components (legs, seat, backrest, armrests, etc), we see it as the whole right away then we break it down to its parts if we are interested. Many of the laws of gestalt theory are used in graphic design today. These laws are very similar to ones we learned in this chapter. They include grouping, proximity, continuity and others.
Terms: Gestalt theory
Sources:
http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology
https://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/gestalt_principles_of_form_perception.html
Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, is an impairment in the recognition of faces. Making it so that those who have it can not in any way recognize faces that they see no matter how often they see them. It is often accompanied by other types of recognition impairments but sometimes it appears to be restricted to facial identity. Prosopagnosia can create serious social problems. If you can't recognize people it is hard to form social relationships, friends and any other sort of "normal" interaction with people. This can often make it so that those who have it have difficulty recognizing family members, close friends, and even themselves. They often use alternative routes to recognition, but these routes are not as effective as recognition of the face (how we all recognize people).
Acquired prosopagnosia can kick in after a brain injury or stroke, whereas developmental prosopagnosia appears early and seems to have genetic roots. Researchers estimate that one in 50 people may have some form of prosopagnosia. The cases can range in severity for those who suffer from prosopagnosia.
Since there is really no cure to this issue those who suffer with it try to use things such as remember details about their friends and family that they can place together and hopefully remember who they are from that!
Although we discussed that it can develop after strokes or brain injury we also know that prosopagnosia has some genetic factors. Some degree of prosopagnosia is often present in children with autism and Asperger's syndrome as well, and may be the cause of their impaired social development (but this isn't for sure).
One story that I found interesting and extremely sad was of a woman who suffered a brain injury at her job as a firefighter. From this she developed prosopagnosia and then couldn't continue her job anymore due to the disorder. Not only did she lose her job but she couldn't recognize her own family, not even her mother. She was shown photos of her mom and couldn't recognize her by her face alone but when shown the rest of the photo of her mother she could recognize her. I think that when we see people we have such an emotional bond with actually recognizing someone we care about and it would be horrible to lose that feeling. I know that after a long day when I see my boyfriend at the end of the day I am instantly happy; recognizing his face does that for me. The same happens when I see my parents or my sister, it would be terrible to lose that feeling. I think with this disorder it would be easy to feel unattached and lose feelings.
Overall this is something that many people struggle with and suffer from every day. Research on the topic continues and will continue until we think of more reliable ways to help those who are suffering with prosopagnosia.
SOURCES USED:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCrxomPbtY- I liked this video because it gave me a real live perspective of a person who is dealing with these issues everyday helping us relate to it.
http://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/index/information- this webpage was a great organized webpage that helped break down the information and also seemed really reliable and made the material easier to understand.
https://www.faceblind.org/research/ was a neat website because it used people throughout history with this disorder and explained their individual stories.
terms: prosopagnosia, neurological disorder, face blindness, facial agnosia, intellectual functions, depression, social phobia.
I read a book once about a man who became blind at age 3. Forty years later, technology had advanced, and he had the opportunity to get his sight back. This individual had adapted quite successfully to his blindness, utilizing a guide dog, cane, and extremely perceptive echolocation to visualize his surroundings. After the operation, he found he could not make sense of the world around him. It seems part of his visual system had been reclaimed for other purposes in his brain (possibly those that helped him overcome blindness). The entire world was a collection of shapes to him; for example, stairs appeared the same as stripes on the ground. Although it was extraordinarily difficult to re-learn how to see because he was much older, he was able to regain not only his sight, but his ability to see the world around him.
While reading the chapter, something really caught my attention. On page 100, “Calling this understanding “implicit” means that we need not be able to verbalize the rule in order to use it. Monkeys seem to see the subjective contours without benefit of instruction in physics.” From an evolutionary standpoint, we can assume animals are aware of gravity, though they are not consciously thinking about it. Similarly, we do not generally (unless you are psychophysicist or perhaps a philosopher) go around considering the visual riddles that greet us on a daily basis or the midlevel vision that contributes to our perception of such riddles.
This week I decided to learn more about this idea – are we (and primates) born with an implicit understanding of basic physics, giving us the ability to make visual leaps? Or does our visual system develop these assumptions at a very young age? Despite the rules the visual system is known to follow, including the Gestalt grouping principles as well as the theories of more recent research, there are still some questions. The committee system is only successful if they can come to an agreement. This is where the Necker cube and duck-rabbit come of interest in the research lab, because they confirm what we know about these rules and the committee framework. When examining these special cases, our interpretation will generally depend on where our attention is focused. The chapter mentions the importance of attention – as an example, monkeys don’t give the eyes or face any particular attention the way humans do. We rely on facial expressions in social interaction, therefore extra emphasis is placed on this.
Implicit understanding, Gestalt grouping principles, visual system, attention
http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=689c38b9-a832-4a2b-ab3e-0fc3fe1dddce%40sessionmgr4001&hid=4105&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#db=f5h&AN=61352108
Having evolved over a billion years, the function of the eye in most vertebrates is the same. The understanding which contributes to perception is less certain. This article explains a great deal about the differences in eye functioning that have seemingly resulted from evolution, but does not discuss the implications of evolution on perception.
http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/623/art%253A10.1007%252Fs12264-013-1367-2.pdf?auth66=1424294573_ac0d6e15d2c3bbc6532789f4e160cadf&ext=.pdf
When looking at pictures of humans or monkeys or both, humans prefer looking at the eyes or looking at what the hands are doing (whether the subject is human or monkey). Monkeys prefer to look at the eyes, head or body of monkeys in pictures, but avoid looking at the eyes of humans. This article examines evolution’s impact on eye-tracking.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/com/128/2/188.pdf
Gestalt grouping principles are not found in use among children with low functioning autism or tamarin monkeys. In both groups, not using the Gestalt principles showed no effect on response time. The article concludes that although pieces of the visual system may be developmentally affected by low-functioning autism (or being a primate), it is not necessarily to the detriment of recognition. This subject requires much more study, the researchers may have used a sample too small to show an effect.
Mike May’s story: http://senderogroup.com/mm/mike.htm
I read a book once about a man who became blind at age 3. Forty years later, technology had advanced, and he had the opportunity to get his sight back. This individual had adapted quite successfully to his blindness, utilizing a guide dog, cane, and extremely perceptive echolocation to visualize his surroundings. After the operation, he found he could not make sense of the world around him. It seems part of his visual system had been reclaimed for other purposes in his brain (possibly those that helped him overcome blindness). The entire world was a collection of shapes to him; for example, stairs appeared the same as stripes on the ground. Although it was extraordinarily difficult to re-learn how to see because he was much older, he was able to regain not only his sight, but his ability to see the world around him.
While reading the chapter, something really caught my attention. On page 100, “Calling this understanding “implicit” means that we need not be able to verbalize the rule in order to use it. Monkeys seem to see the subjective contours without benefit of instruction in physics.” From an evolutionary standpoint, we can assume animals are aware of gravity, though they are not consciously thinking about it. Similarly, we do not generally (unless you are psychophysicist or perhaps a philosopher) go around considering the visual riddles that greet us on a daily basis or the midlevel vision that contributes to our perception of such riddles.
This week I decided to learn more about this idea – are we (and primates) born with an implicit understanding of basic physics, giving us the ability to make visual leaps? Or does our visual system develop these assumptions at a very young age? Despite the rules the visual system is known to follow, including the Gestalt grouping principles as well as the theories of more recent research, there are still some questions. The committee system is only successful if they can come to an agreement. This is where the Necker cube and duck-rabbit come of interest in the research lab, because they confirm what we know about these rules and the committee framework. When examining these special cases, our interpretation will generally depend on where our attention is focused. The chapter mentions the importance of attention – as an example, monkeys don’t give the eyes or face any particular attention the way humans do. We rely on facial expressions in social interaction, therefore extra emphasis is placed on this.
Implicit understanding, Gestalt grouping principles, visual system, attention
http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=689c38b9-a832-4a2b-ab3e-0fc3fe1dddce%40sessionmgr4001&hid=4105&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#db=f5h&AN=61352108
Having evolved over a billion years, the function of the eye in most vertebrates is the same. The understanding which contributes to perception is less certain. This article explains a great deal about the differences in eye functioning that have seemingly resulted from evolution, but does not discuss the implications of evolution on perception.
http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/623/art%253A10.1007%252Fs12264-013-1367-2.pdf?auth66=1424294573_ac0d6e15d2c3bbc6532789f4e160cadf&ext=.pdf
When looking at pictures of humans or monkeys or both, humans prefer looking at the eyes or looking at what the hands are doing (whether the subject is human or monkey). Monkeys prefer to look at the eyes, head or body of monkeys in pictures, but avoid looking at the eyes of humans. This article examines evolution’s impact on eye-tracking.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/com/128/2/188.pdf
Gestalt grouping principles are not found in use among children with low functioning autism or tamarin monkeys. In both groups, not using the Gestalt principles showed no effect on response time. The article concludes that although pieces of the visual system may be developmentally affected by low-functioning autism (or being a primate), it is not necessarily to the detriment of recognition. This subject requires much more study, the researchers may have used a sample too small to show an effect.
Mike May’s story: http://senderogroup.com/mm/mike.htm
I chose to do after images. This fits in with the chapter because this chapter talked about how we see color and after images is how the opposite color shows up after staring at one color for a long period of time. I think its interesting because its something I experienced as a child with the 'magic eye' books.
Afterimages are a type of optical illusion. In my first link below, it gives you examples to show you how it works. You stare at the middle of an image, when the screen turns white you can still see the after affects of the image. Reading online, its a little different than the magic eye books which is more what I pictured reading the chapters, but still similar.
There are 2 types of after images, positive and negative. Positive after images are when the after image shows up the same as the original color, if what your staring at is blue, it shows up as blue on the white screen. Negative after images show up as the opposite color as what your looking at. So a red image would turn green, blue would turn yellow, etc.
After images, positive, negative, optical illusion,
http://sites.sinauer.com/wolfe3e/chap5/afterimagesF.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/sensationandperception/f/afterimages.htm
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctyibp/Afterimages.pdf
1A) agnosia
it relates to the chapter because it discuses how people see and recognition.
im interested in this because i cant even begin to imagine having something like this being able to see everything but not being able to recognize certain things. i think it would drive me nuts.
not being able to detect certain facial features reminds me a little of Sheldon of the big bang theory and the TV show Dexter the main character Dexter. it makes me think more about what can course it and how it effects different people. i think about if it can effect emotions at all. if you cant tell peoples emotion do you not show that emotion well. agnoisa is something that go hand in hand with not seeing emotions and facial expressions and other types of blindness can be related to it. its a rare ordeal but people do have it there is even a movie about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosia
http://www.dana.org/Publications/GuideDetails.aspx?id=49987
http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/neurologic_disorders/function_and_dysfunction_of_the_cerebral_lobes/agnosia.html
Agnosia is an inability to process information – not perceive it. So a person could see an object and not recognize it, even though the sense of vision is not defective. It is associated with a brain injury or neurological illness, particularly with damage to the occipitotemporal border. Auditory agnosia is difficulty distinguishing environmental and non-verbal auditory cues including distinguishing speech from non-speech. The problem usually only affects one information pathway. Testing does not attribute the inability to any problems with sensing the world, general thinking, language or attention. Diagnosis includes neuropsychologic testing with brain imaging to identify the cause. There is no specific treatment, although occupational therapy may help patients compensate.
Terms: brain injury, neurological illness, occipitotemporal border, information pathway, diagnosis, neuropsychologic testing, brain imaging, occupational therapy.
My topic is prosopagnosia. It relates to the chapter, because it is a deficiency in the brain's ability to perceive the world around it to the full extent that it should be able to. I am very interested in this topic, because as someone who has not experienced this condition, it is hard for me to imagine what it would be like to live with it. There is no way, as far as I am aware, for someone that does not have this disorder to experience what it is like to look at a face you have known your entire life and not be able to recognize it, even if you know who it is.
Prosopagnosia, or more commonly referred to as face blindness, is a cognitive disorder where the brain's ability to recognize faces is impaired. It is essentially sensation without perception. This condition can arise from either acute brain damage or a person may be born with it. Approximately 2.5% of the population is afflicted with the congenital form of this disorder. Prosopagnosia is usually associated with the fusiform gyrus. This is the section of the brain that is activated specifically in response to faces. The fusiform gyrus is what allows us to see faces in greater detail than similarly complex inanimate objects. That is why when this part of the brain becomes damaged, one may have trouble recognizing the finer details of someone's face. There are varying degrees of prosopagnosia. While many with this disorder only have trouble recognizing individual faces, others report deficits in other aspects of facial processing, such as not being able to judge age, gender, emotional expressions, or the direction of a person's eye gaze. Still others find that their troubles extend to not being able to recognize other stimuli, such as inanimate objects or animals. The varying degree of one's condition puts them into one of two types of acquired prosopagnosia: apperceptive and associative. Apperceptive prosopagnosia is the more serious of the two. People with this type are unable to make any sense of faces whatsoever and are unable to make comparing/contrasting judgments when presented with pictures of different faces. They are unable to recognize both familiar and unfamiliar faces. Associative Prosopagnosia, on the other hand, is less severe. People with this type may be able to say whether pictures of people's faces are the same or different from one another. They may also be able to tell the age and sex of a person by their face. However, they may still not be able to identify these people or provide any information about them, such as their names, jobs, or when they were encountered. This shows that people with this form of prosopagnosia can make sense of some face information but not all.
Though there have been several attempts at remediation, there are currently no therapies that have demonstrated lasting real-world improvements across a group of prosopagnosics. Prosopagnosics often learn to use "piecemeal" or "feature-by-feature" recognition strategies. This may involve secondary clues such as clothing, gait, hair color, body shape, and voice. Because the face seems to function as an important identifying feature in memory, it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialize normally with others. Prosopagnosia has also been associated with other disorders that are associated with nearby brain areas: left hemianopsia (loss of vision from left side of space, associated with damage to the right occipital lobe), achromatopsia (a deficit in color perception often associated with unilateral or bilateral lesions in the temporo-occipital junction) and topographical disorientation (a loss of environmental familiarity and difficulties in using landmarks, associated with lesions in the posterior part of the parahippocampal gyrus and anterior part of the lingual gyrus of the right hemisphere).
It is impossible for someone that does not suffer from this condition to truly understand what it is like living with it. People afflicted with prosopagnosia can easily become very frustrated with not being able to recognize even loved ones. They may even feel as though they have lost an important connection to those loved ones, because they literally cannot put a face to them, making them seem as though they are less personified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia - I used this source, because it provided a greater amount of information than most other sites that I could find, while still presenting that information in a very organized and easy to comprehend manner.
http://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/index/information - I used this website, because it presented the information in a very well organized fashion. The site is also from a current research lab dedicated specifically to the topic, so the information was both accurate and up to date.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCrxomPbtY - I used this source, because it showed how difficult it is for people living with the disorder. It went beyond the facts presented on a page and presented it in a humanized fashion.
Terms: Prosopagnosia, Face Blindness, Fusiform Gyrus, Apperceptive Prosopagnosia, Associative Prosopagnosia, Perception, Sensation, Recognition, Left Hemianopsia, Achromatopsia, Topographical Disorientation
(1a) Prosopagnosia
(1b) Prosopagnosia was discussed as a special case of object recognition in the chapter.
(1c) Prosopagnosia interested me because of its rarity, but due to recent times more people are being diagnosed day by day. I wanted to explore the research, treatment options, symptoms, and general information regarding prosopagnosia
(2) Face blindness or prosopagnosia is a severe deficit in recognizing familiar people from their face. Some report suffering from a very selective impairment that only influences the recognition of faces, others find out that their deficit extends to more stimuli, like objects, cars and animals. Many also report that they have trouble judging gender or age, recognizing expressions, or following the direction of a persons eye gaze. In addition, a large portion report navigational difficulties. Individuals have been more prone to prosopagnosia after suffering a stroke or head injury. Recently it has became more common, but these individuals don’t suffer any neurological damage, they suffer from developmental prosopagnosia. These DP individuals fail to develop normal face processing skills while having normal intellectual and perceptual functions. Recent studies have provided evidence that genetically they could develop DP. Prosopagnosia has been linked to autism, Williams’ Syndrome, and Turners’ Syndrome. Currently there is no treatment option available for prosopagnosia, but due to recent reports of possible P, doctors and other scholars have committed their time to examining and researching it more so then ever before.
Millionaire businessman Duncan Bannatyne announced to his friends via social media that he suffers from prosopagnosia. This story is interesting because this successful businessman had to recognize faces in order to become a millionaire right? Or the guys just a networking wizard! He wanted to cause awareness of the disease since only 2.5% of the population suffered from it. He said we can come off as being very rude, just to generate awareness and understanding google it. Make sure you or a friend isn’t suffering from it. Some prosopagnosia sufferers experience occasional embarrassment, but others it affects their social aptitude and even their employment options. The stress from the condition can lead to anxiety and even depression because it can become so difficult to cope with. For the ones who can successfully develop compensatory skills to recognize faces, cope very well. Coping mechanisms include recognizing non facial cues like hairstyle or clothing, understanding friends and family are asked to introduce themselves each time they meet. Sometimes breakdowns happen in the coping mechanisms used, thats why adults want awareness to increase because children having to go through this disorder can be a very difficult task.
Prosopagnosia is being diagnosed more and more around the world. To generate awareness to people unfamiliar with this rare disease there are some certain symptoms to look for in not only yourself but in friends and family as well. When you meet someone, you try to remember their hairstyle or distinctive feature. You have failed to recognize a friend or family member, especially when they visit out of the blue. You cannot follow along or get enjoyment out of movies or television shows. You have trouble even recognizing yourself in the mirror or pictures that have been taken of you. When someone waves or says hello to you, you have no idea who they are. These are just some symptoms to help you understand the deficit, not a lot of people are aware of the disease so the research and online information is limited.
(3) prosopagnosia, congenital prosopagnosia, face blindness
(4) http://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/index/information
I chose this site because it provided information on prosopagnosia at a research university at Bournemouth which is a centre for face processing disorders so i knew it was credible.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/jun/20/face-blindness-research
I chose this site because it provided examples of coping with prosopagnosia, while also generating awareness by explaining a day in the shoes of someone with prosopagnosia.
http://www.humanuniqueness.org/do-you-suffer-from-face-blindness-seven-signs-and-symptoms-of-prosopagnosia/
I chose this source because in depth research studies on this deficit were hard to come by. So I felt like awareness of the symptoms this source provided knowledge to those who are unaware.