Abstract
The perception of persisting visual objects is mediated by transient intermediate representations, object files, that are instantiated in response to some, but not all, visual trajectories. The standard object file concept does not, however, provide a mechanism sufficient to account for all experimental data on visual object persistence, object tracking, and the ability to perceive spatially disconnected stimuli as continuously existing objects. Based on relevant anatomical, functional, and developmental data, a functional model is constructed that bases visual object individuation on the recognition of temporal sequences of apparent center-of-mass positions that are specifically identified as trajectories by dedicated “trajectory recognition networks” downstream of the medial–temporal motion-detection area. This model is shown to account for a wide range of data, and to generate a variety of testable predictions. Individual differences in the recognition, abstraction, and encoding of trajectory information are expected to generate distinct object persistence judgments and object recognition abilities. Dominance of trajectory information over feature information in stored object tokens during early infancy, in particular, is expected to disrupt the ability to re-identify human and other individuals across perceptual episodes, and lead to developmental outcomes with characteristics of autism spectrum disorders.
Highlights
It is well accepted that the human ability to perceive the visual world as composed of discrete, persisting entities rests on the construction of intermediate visual representations, termed “object files” by Kahneman and Treisman (1984), that bind spatial and featural information to form “objects” that can be tracked as their apparent locations, sizes, and surface features change through time
While the symptomatology of ASD is extraordinarily complex and single-mechanism accounts of its etiology have been unconvincing (Happé et al, 2006; Rajendran and Mitchell, 2007), these brief considerations do suggest that overly specific encoding of trajectory information in object tokens may contribute to the developmental outcomes characteristic of ASD
The object file concept developed over the last three decades (Treisman, 2006; Scholl, 2007; Flombaum et al, 2008) suffers a number of difficulties: it is not clear how local computations with access only to the current and previous locations of an object could determine whether its trajectory indicates object persistence; it is not clear how object files can be instantiated for disconnected sets of objects such as point-light walkers; and it is not clear what happens to the precise trajectory information that enabled the perception of a persistent object when a permanent object token incorporating abstracted trajectory information is encoded
Summary
The standard object file concept does not, provide a mechanism sufficient to account for all experimental data on visual object persistence, object tracking, and the ability to perceive spatially disconnected stimuli as continuously existing objects. Functional, and developmental data, a functional model is constructed that bases visual object individuation on the recognition of temporal sequences of apparent center-of-mass positions that are identified as trajectories by dedicated “trajectory recognition networks” downstream of the medial–temporal motion-detection area.This model is shown to account for a wide range of data, and to generate a variety of testable predictions. Individual differences in the recognition, abstraction, and encoding of trajectory information are expected to generate distinct object persistence judgments and object recognition abilities.
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