evans%Nosc@sri-unix.UUCP (12/05/83)
From: evans@Nosc (Evan C. Evans)
Ken Laws in AIList Digest 1:99 states: an adequate answer [to
the question of why computers can't see yet] requires a guess
at how it is that the human vision system can work in all cases.
I cannot answer Ken's question, but perhaps I can provide some
useful input.
language shapes culture (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)
culture shapes vision (see following)
vision shapes language (a priori)
The influence of culture on perception (vision) takes many forms.
A statistical examination (unpublished) of the British newspaper
game "Where's the ball?" is worth consideration. This game has
been appearing for some time in British, Australian, New Zealand,
& Fijian papers. So far as I know, it has not yet made its ap-
pearance in U.S. papers. The game is played thus:
A photograph of some common sport involving a ball is
published with the ball erased from the picture & the question,
where's the ball? Various members of the readership send in
their guesses & that closest to the ball's actual position in the
unmodified photo wins. Some time back the responses to several
rounds of this game were subjected to statistical analysis. This
analysis showed that there were statistically valid differences
associated with the cultural background of the participants.
This finding was particularly striking in Fiji with a resident
population comprising several very different cultural groups.
Ball placement by the different groups tended to cluster at sig-
nificantly different locations in the picture, even for a game
like soccer that was well known & played by all. It is unfor-
tunate that this work (not mine) has not been published. It does
suggest two things: a.) a cultural influence on vision & percep-
tion, & b.) a powerful means of conducting experiments to learn
more about this influence. For instance, this same research was
elaborated into various TV displays designed to discover where
children of various age groups placed an unseen object to which
an arrow pointed. The children responded enthusiastically to
this new TV game, giving their answers by means of a light pen.
Yet statistically significant amounts of data were collected ef-
ficiently & painlessly.
I've constructed the loop above to suggest that none of
the three: vision, language, & culture should be studied out of
context.
E. C. Evans III