| Feldman, J. What is a visual object ? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2003 (7)6:252-256 [pdf] |
| The concept of an object plays a central role in cognitive science, particularly in vision, reasoning and conceptual development but it has rarely been given a concrete formal definition. Here I argue that visual objects cannot be defined according to simple physical properties but can instead be understood in terms of the hierarchical organization of visual scene interpretations. Within the tree describing such a hierarchical description, certain nodes make natural candidates as the joints between objects, representing division points between parts of the image that cohere internally but do not perceptually group with one another. Thus each subtree hanging from such a node corresponds to a single perceived object . This formal defi- nition accords with several intuitions about the way objects behave. |
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