Imagine being able to place your fingers on

Imagine being able to place your fingers on things in the world without being able to detect their properties in this way, but being able to refer to those things so you could move your gaze or attention to them. If you could you would possess FINgers of INSTantiation (FINSTs)!

Review of FINSTs and MOT • FINSTs as the mechansm by which the early vision module individuates, selects, refers to, and keeps track of individual things in a scene without using any encoding (or conceptualization) of their properties • MOT (and several other experimental paradigms) as demonstrations of FINSTs in action • FINSTs are the visual system’s analogue of individuation and demonstractive reference that works without the apparatus of concepts

FINST Theory postulates a small number of pointer mechanisms in early vision that are elicited by causal events in the visual field and that enable vision to refer to things without doing so under concept or description

The assumption is that we have a way to directly pick out individual distal elements as sensory individuals – not as bearers of certain known properties Examples where such indexes are needed: Ø Incremental construction of visual representations – the correspondence problem over time (geometry example) Ø Encoding relational predicates; e. g. , Collinear (x, y, z, . . ); Closed (C); Inside (x, C); Above (x, y); Square (w, x, y, z), requires simultaneously binding the arguments of n-place predicates to n elements in the visual scene ü Evaluating such visual predicates requires individuating and referencing the objects over which the predicate is evaluated: i. e. , the arguments in the predicate must be bound to individual objects in the scene.

Multiple Object Tracking Demos

Keep track of the objects that flash

It even works if objects are allowed to self occlude

Examples of additional findings with MOT with occlusion MOT with virtual occluders MOT with matched nonoccluding disappearance Track endpoints of lines Track rubber-band linked boxes Track and remember ID by location Track and remember ID by name (number) Track while everything briefly disappears (½ sec) and goes on moving while invisible Track while everything briefy disappears and reappears where they were when they disappeared

Demo of Object File Experiment Object-Specific Priming Benefit

Demo of Object File Experiment