Perceptual completion experiment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Perceptual completion experiment - Essay ExampleThere are other reasons too, kindred cortical scotoma. There have been numerous studies on the process of perceptual completion and various theories on how this process occurs have been put forward.The first someone to notice the phenomenon of filling-in was the inventor of kaleidoscope, Sir David Brewster in the nineteenth century. In 1832, he wrote, Though the base of the optic nerve is insensible to light that falls directly upon it, heretofore it has been made susceptible of receiving luminous impressions from the parts which surround it, andthe spotin place of being black, has always the same color as the ground (Crossland and Rubin, 2007). The phenomenon wasnt studied for a long time until the twentieth century. In the recent times, however, this phenomenon has been largely studied using something called as artificial scotomas.V.S. Ramachandran and Richard Gregory developed artificial scotoma. In artificial scotoma, a small ob ject such as a small dot is surrounded by a background noise. After steady looking at the object for some time, the object vanishes in the background noise. (Pessoa & Weerd, 2003)But filling in is not only influenced by the area close to the blind spot. It is also influenced by attention and extended distance as shown by Ramachandran. If two orthogonal lines, one black and one white, of equal lengths, are running through the blind spot, you do not see a grayish smear at the centre. Instead, the line on which you focus to a greater extent is more easily completed by perceptual completion. Now, if, one of the lines is longer, the line that is longer is more easily completed. (Pessoa & Weerd, 2003)Dennett, however, argues that there is no filling-in but finding out. Dennett argues that our mind simply ignores the blind spot and there is no neural process involved in doing this. He further argues that if brain knows what