Dawei Bai

Astronaut meme: "Wait, it's all perception?" "Always has been"

Our 'core perception' framework has many implications: it generates a ton of ready-to-test hypotheses, raises questions about conceptual development, and more.
We look forward to seeing your comments! The call will be open soon!
(If you can’t access the paper: www.daweibai.com/publications...)
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From physics to even the social domain, we consistently find this pattern: core knowledge representations also guide visual processing of objects, number, geometry, agents, etc, suggesting that these two are the same thing — perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults.
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Why think this? We show a striking and consistent overlap between (1) core representations found in infants, and (2) representations found in ‘high-level’ adult vision. Specifically, core representations display empirical signatures of perception in adults: automatic, encapsulated, and so on.
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We argue that core knowledge — which is canonically considered *conceptual* (or at least non-perceptual) in nature — is best explained as part of *perception*. In other words, we think that infants’ early conceptual knowledge about the world should be reframed as sophisticated forms of seeing.
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Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving
With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland
Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014...
A short thread [1/5]👇

The Double Ring Illusion shows that *physics* is integrated in our visual system!
Our paper pushes this illusion a lot further in various ways: adding other cues to compete with solidity, generalizing to other displays, etc. Check it out in JEP:G! doi.org/10.1037/xge0....
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Is this percept actually explained by the proximity of the rings? Have a look at these gapped rings.
If you’re like most people, the unstable percept is restored – because the gaps remove the possibility of solidity violation.
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This suggests that the visual system ‘knows’ that objects cannot pass through each other (i.e. ‘solidity’ constraint), thus ‘forcing’ you to predominantly see the motion that respects solidity (180° co-rotation), rather than the motion that violates it (360° co-rotation)!
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How about in this case?
Surprisingly, most people *predominantly see 180° motion*, while 360° motion is hardly, if ever, perceived – even though the rings move in the same way as above!
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How do the rings appear to move, if you fixate on the cross?
For most people, the rings move sometimes in 180° co-rotations (‘flipping’ back and forth), sometimes in 360° co-rotations. This multistable percept is normal, since the stimuli are ambiguous.
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New paper: the ‘Double Ring Illusion’!
Does the visual system integrate *intuitive physics*? This new illusion developed by Brent Strickland and I offers a straightforward demonstration – one that you can experience yourselves!
Demos in thread👇
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Me please, thanks!

I just discovered a thing called "hot chocolate with marshmallows" yesterday 😵