Irving Biederman | University of Southern California (original) (raw)
Papers by Irving Biederman
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
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Behavioural Processes
We explored the pigeon's representation of the shape of simple three-dimensional objects ... more We explored the pigeon's representation of the shape of simple three-dimensional objects (geons) rotated in depth (four views each of four geons). Pigeons assigned to the Categorization group had to respond differentially to images of four different geons-termed arch, barrel, brick, and wedge-based on their 3D shape, regardless of the orientation of the object. Pigeons assigned to the Pseudocategorization group had to respond differentially to the same objects based on groupings that did not correspond to object identity, which required the learning of local orientation-dependent features (e.g., a concave curve on top, or the position of an illumination hotspot). The Categorization group, which could employ object-identity representations, quickly achieved highly accurate responding. The Pseudocategorization group, however, failed to achieve reliable above-chance responding. In addition, the reaction times for the Categorization group were significantly shorter than for the Pseudocategorization group. These results indicate that pigeons show a strong, spontaneous tendency to categorize the shapes of different orientations in depth of the same 3D object as similar, if not equivalent; they do so despite the vast differences in image characteristics caused by the variations in orientations, even when such categorization is contrary to the reinforcement contingencies.
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Neuropsychologia, Jan 14, 2018
We compare and contrast five differences between person identification by voice and face. 1. Ther... more We compare and contrast five differences between person identification by voice and face. 1. There is little or no cost when a familiar face is to be recognized from an unrestricted set of possible faces, even at Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) rates, but the accuracy of familiar voice recognition declines precipitously when the set of possible speakers is increased from one to a mere handful. 2. Whereas deficits in face recognition are typically perceptual in origin, those with normal perception of voices can manifest severe deficits in their identification. 3. Congenital prosopagnosics (CPros) and congenital phonagnosics (CPhon) are generally unable to imagine familiar faces and voices, respectively. Only in CPros, however, is this deficit a manifestation of a general inability to form visual images of any kind. CPhons report no deficit in imaging non-voice sounds. 4. The prevalence of CPhons of 3.2% is somewhat higher than the reported prevalence of approximately 2.0% for...
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Vision research, Jan 20, 2018
Familiar objects, specified by name, can be identified with high accuracy when embedded in a rapi... more Familiar objects, specified by name, can be identified with high accuracy when embedded in a rapidly presented sequence of images at rates exceeding 10 images/s. Not only can target objects be detected at such brief presentation rates, they can also be detected under high uncertainty, where their classification is defined negatively, e.g., "Not a Tool." The identification of a familiar speaker's voice declines precipitously when uncertainty is increased from one to a mere handful of possible speakers. Is the limitation imposed by uncertainty, i.e., the number of possible individuals, a general characteristic of processes for person individuation such that the identifiability of a familiar face would undergo a similar decline with uncertainty? Specifically, could the presence of an unnamed celebrity, thus any celebrity, be detected when presented in a rapid sequence of unfamiliar faces? If so, could the celebrity be identified? Despite the markedly greater physical simi...
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Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
The lateral occipital complex (LOC), the cortical region critical for shape perception, is locali... more The lateral occipital complex (LOC), the cortical region critical for shape perception, is localized with fMRI by its greater BOLD activity when viewing intact objects compared with their scrambled versions (resembling texture). Despite hundreds of studies investigating LOC, what the LOC localizer accomplishes—beyond distinguishing shape from texture—has never been resolved. By independently scattering the intact parts of objects, the axis structure defining the relations between parts was no longer defined. This led to a diminished BOLD response, despite the increase in the number of independent entities (the parts) produced by the scattering, thus indicating that LOC specifies interpart relations, in addition to specifying the shape of the parts themselves. LOC's sensitivity to relations is not confined to those between parts but is also readily apparent between objects, rendering it—and not subsequent “place” areas—as the critical region for the representation of scenes. More...
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Brain and language, Aug 1, 2016
A web-based survey estimated the distribution of voice recognition abilities with a focus on dete... more A web-based survey estimated the distribution of voice recognition abilities with a focus on determining the prevalence of developmental phonagnosia, the inability to identify a familiar person based on their voice. Participants matched clips of 50 celebrity voices to 1-4 named headshots of celebrities whose voices they had previously rated for familiarity. Given a strong correlation between rated familiarity and recognition performance, a residual was calculated based on the average familiarity rating on each trial, which thus constituted each respondent's voice recognition ability that could not be accounted for by familiarity. 3.2% of the respondents (23 of 730 participants) had residual recognition scores 2.28 SDs below the mean (whereas 8 or 1.1% would have been expected from a normal distribution). They also judged whether they could imagine the voice of five familiar celebrities. Individuals who had difficulty in imagining voices were also generally below average in their...
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Journal of Vision, 2016
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Journal of Vision, 2016
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Biederman's introduction of geons to the vision community has spawned considerable inter... more Biederman's introduction of geons to the vision community has spawned considerable interest in building geon-based vision systems. However, numerous issues must be addressed before such systems can make a practical contribution to machine vision. At IJCAI, 1993, a group of distinguished researchers, each of whom has worked with geon-based recognition, was brought together to form a panel whose goal was to identify and discuss these issues. This paper is based on that panel discussion.
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Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1970
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Cognitive Psychology, 1991
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This is the final report for a conference grant entitled: A conference on Three-Dimensional Repre... more This is the final report for a conference grant entitled: A conference on Three-Dimensional Representation. The two and one-half day conference was held at the University of Minn. on May 24 to 26, 1989 to evaluate the current status of problem associated with three-dimensional representations from current computational, psychological, development, and neurophysiological perspectives. Nineteen presentations were made spanning these approaches.
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i-Perception, 2011
Scenes can be understood with extraordinary speed and facility, not merely as an inventory of ind... more Scenes can be understood with extraordinary speed and facility, not merely as an inventory of individual objects but in the coding of the relations among them. These relations, which can be readily described by prepositions or gerunds (e.g., a hand holding a pen), allows the explicit representation of complex structures. Where in the brain are inter-object relations specified? In a series of fMRI experiments, we show that pairs of objects shown as interacting elicit greater activity in LOC than when the objects are depicted side-by-side (e.g., a hand beside a pen). Other visual areas, PPA, IPS, and DLPFC, did not show this sensitivity to scene relations, rendering it unlikely that the relations were computed in these regions. Using EEG and TMS, we further show that LOC's sensitivity to object interactions arises around 170ms post stimulus onset and that disruption of normal LOC activity—but not IPS activity—is detrimental to the behavioral sensitivity of inter-object relations. Insofar as LOC is the earliest cortical region where shape is distinguished from texture, our results provide strong evidence that scene-like relations are achieved simultaneously with the perception of object shape and not inferred at some stage following object identification.
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Journal of Vision, 2015
Identical top halves of two faces are more likely to be perceived as different when their differe... more Identical top halves of two faces are more likely to be perceived as different when their different bottom halves are aligned rather than offset. Here, we demonstrate that the magnitude of the offset effect for each face can be predicted from a model of overlapping receptive fields with tuning profiles similar to the hypercolumns of simple cells in V1, although the cells are likely in face-selective areas. Importantly, a single face part (e.g. the left eye) is coded by multiple large receptive fields centered at a distance from the face part (Fig. 1). When different bottom halves are aligned to the identical top halves of faces, the large receptive fields centered on the top half of the face will extend to the differing bottom halves, thus making the top halves of the faces more dissimilar. By offsetting the differing bottom halves from the identical top halves of two faces, the features of the bottom halves no longer activate the large receptive fields centered on the top half of the face, leading to more accurate judgments of the identical top halves as the same (Fig. 2). The retention of early-level visual coding (Yue, Tjan, & Biederman, 2006; Xu, Biederman, & Shah, 2014) and the retinotopic representation of a face template in FFA (de Haas et al., 2014) may explain why the offset effect is unique to faces rather than the parts-based representation of objects. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.
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Brain and Language, 2015
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Many of the phenomena of object classification can be derived from a representation specifying a ... more Many of the phenomena of object classification can be derived from a representation specifying a nonaccidental characterization of an object's parts (geons) and relations, termed a geon structural description (GSD). Such a representation: a) enables the facile recognition of depth-rotated objects, even when they are novel, b) provides the information that is employed not only to distinguish basic-level but also highly similar members of subordinate-level classes, and c) enables mapping onto verbal and object-reasoning structures. Recent psychophysical and neural investigations of object recognition have provided additional support to this theory of object representation. I.
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Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
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Behavioural Processes
We explored the pigeon's representation of the shape of simple three-dimensional objects ... more We explored the pigeon's representation of the shape of simple three-dimensional objects (geons) rotated in depth (four views each of four geons). Pigeons assigned to the Categorization group had to respond differentially to images of four different geons-termed arch, barrel, brick, and wedge-based on their 3D shape, regardless of the orientation of the object. Pigeons assigned to the Pseudocategorization group had to respond differentially to the same objects based on groupings that did not correspond to object identity, which required the learning of local orientation-dependent features (e.g., a concave curve on top, or the position of an illumination hotspot). The Categorization group, which could employ object-identity representations, quickly achieved highly accurate responding. The Pseudocategorization group, however, failed to achieve reliable above-chance responding. In addition, the reaction times for the Categorization group were significantly shorter than for the Pseudocategorization group. These results indicate that pigeons show a strong, spontaneous tendency to categorize the shapes of different orientations in depth of the same 3D object as similar, if not equivalent; they do so despite the vast differences in image characteristics caused by the variations in orientations, even when such categorization is contrary to the reinforcement contingencies.
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Neuropsychologia, Jan 14, 2018
We compare and contrast five differences between person identification by voice and face. 1. Ther... more We compare and contrast five differences between person identification by voice and face. 1. There is little or no cost when a familiar face is to be recognized from an unrestricted set of possible faces, even at Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) rates, but the accuracy of familiar voice recognition declines precipitously when the set of possible speakers is increased from one to a mere handful. 2. Whereas deficits in face recognition are typically perceptual in origin, those with normal perception of voices can manifest severe deficits in their identification. 3. Congenital prosopagnosics (CPros) and congenital phonagnosics (CPhon) are generally unable to imagine familiar faces and voices, respectively. Only in CPros, however, is this deficit a manifestation of a general inability to form visual images of any kind. CPhons report no deficit in imaging non-voice sounds. 4. The prevalence of CPhons of 3.2% is somewhat higher than the reported prevalence of approximately 2.0% for...
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Vision research, Jan 20, 2018
Familiar objects, specified by name, can be identified with high accuracy when embedded in a rapi... more Familiar objects, specified by name, can be identified with high accuracy when embedded in a rapidly presented sequence of images at rates exceeding 10 images/s. Not only can target objects be detected at such brief presentation rates, they can also be detected under high uncertainty, where their classification is defined negatively, e.g., "Not a Tool." The identification of a familiar speaker's voice declines precipitously when uncertainty is increased from one to a mere handful of possible speakers. Is the limitation imposed by uncertainty, i.e., the number of possible individuals, a general characteristic of processes for person individuation such that the identifiability of a familiar face would undergo a similar decline with uncertainty? Specifically, could the presence of an unnamed celebrity, thus any celebrity, be detected when presented in a rapid sequence of unfamiliar faces? If so, could the celebrity be identified? Despite the markedly greater physical simi...
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Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
The lateral occipital complex (LOC), the cortical region critical for shape perception, is locali... more The lateral occipital complex (LOC), the cortical region critical for shape perception, is localized with fMRI by its greater BOLD activity when viewing intact objects compared with their scrambled versions (resembling texture). Despite hundreds of studies investigating LOC, what the LOC localizer accomplishes—beyond distinguishing shape from texture—has never been resolved. By independently scattering the intact parts of objects, the axis structure defining the relations between parts was no longer defined. This led to a diminished BOLD response, despite the increase in the number of independent entities (the parts) produced by the scattering, thus indicating that LOC specifies interpart relations, in addition to specifying the shape of the parts themselves. LOC's sensitivity to relations is not confined to those between parts but is also readily apparent between objects, rendering it—and not subsequent “place” areas—as the critical region for the representation of scenes. More...
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Brain and language, Aug 1, 2016
A web-based survey estimated the distribution of voice recognition abilities with a focus on dete... more A web-based survey estimated the distribution of voice recognition abilities with a focus on determining the prevalence of developmental phonagnosia, the inability to identify a familiar person based on their voice. Participants matched clips of 50 celebrity voices to 1-4 named headshots of celebrities whose voices they had previously rated for familiarity. Given a strong correlation between rated familiarity and recognition performance, a residual was calculated based on the average familiarity rating on each trial, which thus constituted each respondent's voice recognition ability that could not be accounted for by familiarity. 3.2% of the respondents (23 of 730 participants) had residual recognition scores 2.28 SDs below the mean (whereas 8 or 1.1% would have been expected from a normal distribution). They also judged whether they could imagine the voice of five familiar celebrities. Individuals who had difficulty in imagining voices were also generally below average in their...
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Journal of Vision, 2016
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Journal of Vision, 2016
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Biederman's introduction of geons to the vision community has spawned considerable inter... more Biederman's introduction of geons to the vision community has spawned considerable interest in building geon-based vision systems. However, numerous issues must be addressed before such systems can make a practical contribution to machine vision. At IJCAI, 1993, a group of distinguished researchers, each of whom has worked with geon-based recognition, was brought together to form a panel whose goal was to identify and discuss these issues. This paper is based on that panel discussion.
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Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1970
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Cognitive Psychology, 1991
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This is the final report for a conference grant entitled: A conference on Three-Dimensional Repre... more This is the final report for a conference grant entitled: A conference on Three-Dimensional Representation. The two and one-half day conference was held at the University of Minn. on May 24 to 26, 1989 to evaluate the current status of problem associated with three-dimensional representations from current computational, psychological, development, and neurophysiological perspectives. Nineteen presentations were made spanning these approaches.
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i-Perception, 2011
Scenes can be understood with extraordinary speed and facility, not merely as an inventory of ind... more Scenes can be understood with extraordinary speed and facility, not merely as an inventory of individual objects but in the coding of the relations among them. These relations, which can be readily described by prepositions or gerunds (e.g., a hand holding a pen), allows the explicit representation of complex structures. Where in the brain are inter-object relations specified? In a series of fMRI experiments, we show that pairs of objects shown as interacting elicit greater activity in LOC than when the objects are depicted side-by-side (e.g., a hand beside a pen). Other visual areas, PPA, IPS, and DLPFC, did not show this sensitivity to scene relations, rendering it unlikely that the relations were computed in these regions. Using EEG and TMS, we further show that LOC's sensitivity to object interactions arises around 170ms post stimulus onset and that disruption of normal LOC activity—but not IPS activity—is detrimental to the behavioral sensitivity of inter-object relations. Insofar as LOC is the earliest cortical region where shape is distinguished from texture, our results provide strong evidence that scene-like relations are achieved simultaneously with the perception of object shape and not inferred at some stage following object identification.
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Journal of Vision, 2015
Identical top halves of two faces are more likely to be perceived as different when their differe... more Identical top halves of two faces are more likely to be perceived as different when their different bottom halves are aligned rather than offset. Here, we demonstrate that the magnitude of the offset effect for each face can be predicted from a model of overlapping receptive fields with tuning profiles similar to the hypercolumns of simple cells in V1, although the cells are likely in face-selective areas. Importantly, a single face part (e.g. the left eye) is coded by multiple large receptive fields centered at a distance from the face part (Fig. 1). When different bottom halves are aligned to the identical top halves of faces, the large receptive fields centered on the top half of the face will extend to the differing bottom halves, thus making the top halves of the faces more dissimilar. By offsetting the differing bottom halves from the identical top halves of two faces, the features of the bottom halves no longer activate the large receptive fields centered on the top half of the face, leading to more accurate judgments of the identical top halves as the same (Fig. 2). The retention of early-level visual coding (Yue, Tjan, & Biederman, 2006; Xu, Biederman, & Shah, 2014) and the retinotopic representation of a face template in FFA (de Haas et al., 2014) may explain why the offset effect is unique to faces rather than the parts-based representation of objects. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.
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Brain and Language, 2015
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Many of the phenomena of object classification can be derived from a representation specifying a ... more Many of the phenomena of object classification can be derived from a representation specifying a nonaccidental characterization of an object's parts (geons) and relations, termed a geon structural description (GSD). Such a representation: a) enables the facile recognition of depth-rotated objects, even when they are novel, b) provides the information that is employed not only to distinguish basic-level but also highly similar members of subordinate-level classes, and c) enables mapping onto verbal and object-reasoning structures. Recent psychophysical and neural investigations of object recognition have provided additional support to this theory of object representation. I.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact