Psychology Colloquium Series | Yi-Chia Chen, Dec. 4

The Psychology Colloquium Series presents Yi-Chia Chen discussing "Smart vision: Seeing beauty, causality, and social intention" on Monday, Dec. 4, from 10:45-11:40 a.m. in Porter Hall 105.

Abstract : When you look out the window on a sunny day, what do you see? According to the textbooks in perceptual psychology, the answers are clear: features (e.g., color and motion), objects (e.g., trees and cars), and scenes (e.g., grass fields and buildings). But of course, your visual impressions are much richer than that: you may see a cluster of trees not just as green, but as beautiful; you may see a metal can not just as reflective, but as crushed; and you may see a person walking by not only as moving leftward, but as avoiding someone. Do we only think about such seemingly higher-level properties, or might we also directly see them? I will share several projects which explore how visual processing automatically gives rise to impressions of beauty, causality, and social intention. These projects, including studies of transformational apparent motion, prototype preferences, and point-light displays, will involve both vivid phenomenological demonstrations and various computational modeling techniques. I invite you to explore with me how visual perception may be ‘smarter’ and more sophisticated than we often assume.