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Behavioral and Brain Sciences Behavioral and Brain Sciences

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Perceptual-cognitive universals as reflections of the world

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2002

Roger N. Shepard
Roger N. Shepard
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2130 roger@psych.stanford.edu
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Abstract

The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe – provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three-dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is canceled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily-shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum-entropy priors.

Keywords

apparent motionBayesian inferencecognitioncolor constancygeneralizationmental rotationperceptionpsychological lawspsychological spaceuniversal laws
Type
Research Article
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , August 2001 , pp. 581 - 601
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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