Research Topics and Research Questions

The Puzzle of Recognizing Environments

People receive features of stimuli from the surrounding environment, group them, and interpret them as objects. Recognizing objects means the perceived features can be grouped by a particular structure of features of an object (see 2.2.2). This follows that objects in the same category (grouped by the same structure of features) are equivalent and indistinguishable in isolation (see 2.2.1). Object categories are therefore multi-element categories. For example, people might have some difficulty in distinguishing twins. Figure 3.1 (left) shows the twin sisters from Taiwan: Sandy and Mandy. It would be quite difficult to identify which one is in the picture on the right.