Law of Familiarity
The law of familiarity states when things form
patterns that are familiar or meaningful they are
likely to be grouped together. Taking a look at top
right picture above we should see that 13 faces are
formed by various groups of rocks. At first glance
the picture seems to be of rocks and streams but
when people change their perceptual organization the rocks and streams become faces. Once a person sees the faces
it’s usually permanently organized in our heads that way and we will never again perceive it as rocks and a stream. The
pictures above also show how our minds perceive things in parts and wholes. The faces in the nature scene would be
virtually impossible to pick out if they were only in parts. However, as whole the faces are easier to perceive. The first
three images also test how pattern recognition works in our mind by allowing us to define individual objects.
The mobius ring and the roman with the impossible architecture are
two examples of how depth perception can be manipulated on a 2D
plane. The vertical columns of the roman architecture appear to make
sense, but as whole, when your eyes try to make sense of the
structure, they cannot reconcile the base with the top. The mobius
strip is similar – it appears to be a normal ring-shape. However, the 3D
gradient shading creates an image in 2D that simply could not exist in
the real 3D world. Other common examples of this is the endless
staircase and the triangle shape.
I feel the Mobius ring and the roman architecture throw off the law of simplicity because we want to see the structure in
the simplest form possible but our brain can’t decide for sure what that would be.
Size Constancy
Perception of the size of an object does not
depend solely on the size of the object’s image on
the receptors. The above picture with the
identically sized soldiers tricks your mind into
seeing them as different heights. The converging
lines cause our mind to perceive depth, and if the
soldiers were in 3D space the furthest soldier
would indeed be larger. However, they are merely
positioned on a page, and on the page they are in
fact all the same height.
Likelihood Principle and Figure-Ground
When most people look at the picture of the word LIFT for
the first time their eyes focus on the dark splotches and the
white text t is no identified as a word. It’s not until they
concentrate a little harder that the word LIFT can be seen.
The likelihood principle states that humans perceive the
object that is most likely to have caused the pattern or stimuli they have perceived.
When I first looked at the above picture the black splotched are the first thing that stands out—the figure. But after
more examination the white text come into play—the ground. Now every time I look at the picture the word LIFT is the
only thing I see and I physically can’t focus on just the black anymore.
The above two images uses pattern recognition as well as the mind’s perception
of wholes and parts.
Humans tend to see the whole image first, which becomes our focus, while the details fade into the background. On
further examination, though, we see that the forms making up the large faces that we perceive are actually people and
objects themselves. Thus, the old man and woman facing each other don’t even really exist… they are just images we
perceive from the combining of the other objects in the image.