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| Object Perception | ||
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| (revised September 21, 1997) |
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| Object Perception | ||
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| (revised September 21, 1997) |
One of the main papers on this faculty is Elizabeth Spelke's "Principles of Object Perception" (1990); the work of Baillargeon (1987) on object permanence is a necessary supplement. Spelke and her associates have done pioneering work in experimental psychology, investigating the rich cognitive abilities of infants. In this article, she situates her work by contrasting it with the alternative traditions of Gestalt psychology and empiricism; in contrast to their proposals for domain-general cognitive faculties, she finds that children make specific kinds of assumptions about the nature of objects that cannot simply have been learned from experience (the frame problem precludes the possibility of bootstrapping oneself up from a position of no prior assumptions), nor are they the intuitively plausible ones of "figural goodness".
Spelke does not address the issue of how children come to have the cognitive dispositions she so meticulously detects and demonstrates. In that sense, her argument is clearly Kantian: early categorization depends on transcendental principles, in the sense that they are not derived from experience. Darwin's painstakingly developed theory of the gradual construction of organic form through natural variation and selection provides a way of thinking about the development of children's strikingly complex inferential abilities that was not available to Kant (cf. Lorenz 1977). This allows us to correlate the specific hypotheses children reliably make about a world that must otherwise have been wholly mysterious to them with the characteristics of the environment in which human beings evolved--the hundreds of thousands of years prior to the advent of agriculture and civilization--and the specific kinds of challenges human infants would have been faced with.
Spelke's Basic Experimental Design
The criteria utilized to identify objects permit a range of inferences about the likely behavior of objects, and studies of children indicate that they infer that
Spelke's work forms the foundation for an understanding of categorization, discussed extensively by Markman (1990): once a category is formed, it becomes a potent site for storing information about members of that category, which can then be applied to new objects of the same kind. Spelke proposes that the identification of a number of items as objects permits the gathering of new general features about objects, beyond what was utilized to specify the objects in the first place. Such generalizations may give rise to the Gestalt principles of figural goodness, color, etc., thus explaining the adult dependence on such cues.
Markman, along the lines of Rosch and Lakoff, finds evidence that categories are organized in terms of family resemblances and prototypical category members. Spelke's findings suggests that some core features (and thus the typical family member) may be specified by nativist cognitive faculties, with an interesting consequence: the information stored in a category--the conceptual primitives, image schemas, and inference algorithms--may apply with the greatest accuracy to the prototypical members of that category. The properties of objects, for instance, do not apply with equal felicitousness to fluids and solids. While a rock is a prototypical example, wind and water are marginal, even doubtful members of the class of objects, and the core properties of objects fit them poorly.
The significance of Spelke's findings for Cognitive Culture Theory comes in at least a couple of flavors:
The specific properties that infants assume objects have--cohesion, boundedness, rigidity, and the absence of action at a distince--are so fundamental that we easily loose sight of how complex they are. It was not until people attempted to construct machines that duplicate human behavioral and cognitive skills that the segmentation of visual arrays into stable three-dimensional objects began to be appreciated for the rich faculty it really is. A robot with arms and general instructions for motion, unless instructed in excruciating detail not to, will as a matter of course attempt to move its limbs through objects--including itself, leading to bizarre behavior such as trying to push an arm through its own head or body. Children, on the other hand, start out assuming that objects cannot occupy the same space and utilize this assumption to detect objects, accepting input from both touch and vision.
The second point takes us back to Galileo's distinction between "primary" (or objectively real) and "secondary" (or subjectively projected) qualities, and thus to the proclivity towards object-construals in science.
In Galileo's materialist ontology, the crucial distinction is between "primary" and "secondary" qualities:
The thoroughly tested nature of the object-construal faculty may mislead us into equating its output with the world itself. We have a variety of reasons to believe that objects constitute a mode of construal that is both phylogenetically and ontogenetically older than the structures that enable us to perceive the world in terms of purposes and mental states. The most obvious is that cats and dogs reliably perceive the world in terms of objects--animals that have diverged from the hominid and primate lines millions of years ago have the same basic skills, indicating that our common ancestor also had them. In addition, object perception is a precondition for other kinds of cognition, such as the detection of agents and minds, as proposed by the decision tree in the previous page. The antiquity of the object perception faculty has given it a very long period of time for natural selection to act upon it and to perfect it by degrees. It is therefore fully to be expected that such a well-designed faculty would occasion a great deal of confidence in the world it construes, which goes some way towards explaining the intuitive appeal of the notion that the world is literally composed of cohesive, bounded, rigid entities that cannot affect each other at a distance. But even if we find it reasonable or convenient to believe that the world really is composed of such entities, on what grounds could we possibly hold that this is the only legitimate way of construing the world?
These modes of construal are additionally useful--and similarly perilous--because they can take input from a variety of sources, and thus permit their inferences to be translated into other domains. When objects are utilized as a source domain for the mapping of a cultural phenomenon, as takes place in the materialist psychological and social theories of the Enlightenment, the underlying assumptions of the object-construal faculty are responsible for much of the conceptual payout.
Quote of the day
"We fancy, that were we brought on a sudden into this world, we could
at first have inferred that one billiard-ball would communicate motion
to another upon impulse; and that we needed not to have waited for the
event, in order to pronounce with certainty concerning it. Such is the
influence of custom, that, where it is strongest, it not only covers our
natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place,
merely because it is found in the highest degree." Hume
1748, Section IV, Part 1, paragraph 24.
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