![]() Man number one, after being rather silent for a while, makes several approaches at her but she gets to the corner across from the door, just as man number two is trying to open it. The girl gets worried and races from one corner to the other in the far part of the room. The first man follows her into the room after having left the second in a rather weakened condition leaning on the wall outside the room. She apparently does not want to be with the first man. Then the two men have a fight, and the girl starts to go into the room to get out of the way and hesitates and finally goes in. The first man tells the second to go the second tells the first, and he shakes his head. The experimenters provide an example of a common interpretation:Ī man has planned to meet a girl and the girl comes along with another man. Thirty two described them as people, and two described the shapes as birds. Most of the thirty four subjects interpreted the shapes in the movie as animate characters. (The rest of this post will only make sense if you watch the video above!) In their first experiment, the psychologists simply instructed their female undergraduate subjects to "write down what happened" in the movie above. This phenomenon was perhaps most famously investigated in 1944 by Smith College experimental psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel. In other words, you have imbued the red and green circles with desires and intentions. Under certain conditions, even 2D shapes can be interpreted as animate social agents rather than simple intentionless objects. You might assume that the red circle "wants" to catch the green one, and that the green circle "wants" to run away. Despite the fact that the retinal input from these two displays are extremely similar, you can't help but think of the circles as "alive" in the second scenario. The two scenarios are very similar, but in one case the green circle's motion was the direct result of a physical impact, while in the second scenario, it was not. This time, before it can collide with it, the green circle moves away. The red circle begins moving towards the green circle, just as before. Thanks to physics, we know that when that happens, the red circle stops moving, and the green circle starts moving in the same direction that the red circle had previously been moving. The red circle moves in a straight line until it collides with the green circle. The mind also works to infer social variables - such as causality and animacy - from simpler inputs, such as actions and movements.įor example, imagine two circles, one red and one green, several inches apart but along the same line. ![]() This kind of simple-to-complex transformation is not unique to inferring the 3D shape of objects. That is, despite the fact that the information that is sent to the visual cortex is 2D, the brain extracts 3D information from it, by using clues like light, shadow, or perspective. Somehow, her brain manages to convert the 2D input from the retina into a 3D representation. When a person looks at a cup, what she sees is the result of a 2D projection of the image onto her retinas. For example, the retina that coats the back of the eye is made of a two dimensional sheet of light-sensitive neurons, like the sensor in a camera. The brain therefore has an enormous task: to take sparse inputs and transform them into extremely complex cognitive representations. ![]() And the information that enters the brain is fairly simple. Information can only enter it through sensory apparatuses: the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin. ![]()
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