Saturday, May 18, 2013

Perceiving Situations (Human Cognitive Functions)

This is the third posting of explaining the figure on human cognitive functions. Today's topic is the perception of situations.

Perceiving Situations is another function of THC (the Temporal Hierarchical Categorizer).  A small animal may perceive, for example, a situation in which it should hide itself upon detecting a moving spot in the sky.   A human being may recall the situation type of Fire upon sensing the smell of burning.   The representation of a Situation normally contains those of objects, their features and relations among them (as in some formal semantic theories).  For example, the representation (frame) of the Eating situation contains the representations of Eater, Food and the (Eating) relation between them.   As the representation of a situation is a combination of its elements, they are normally constructed ad hoc.
While the representation of a situation can be complex, it does not have to be represented at the same time (synchronously) but can be represented dynamically by associating its components one by one.
Dynamic representation can be applied to perception such as complex visual scene perception or multi-modal perceptual integration, where information would be bound by a series of association (see Information Binding, the dotted line from Association in the figure).


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