#apparent motion

Australian based photographer Lincoln Harrison captured these stunning Star Trails that actually made him quite the famous guy all over internet and among landscapes photographers community. You would be amazed to know that all of these photographs are captured by a photographer who started photography just a couple of years ago. Now you would be ...

Australian based photographer Lincoln Harrison captured these stunning Star Trails that actually made him quite the famous guy all over internet and among landscapes photographers community. You would be amazed to know that all of these photographs are captured by a photographer who started photography just a couple of years ago.

Now you would be wondering how he did this? Lincoln utilized long exposure times to capture the apparent motion of stars  in the night sky due to the rotation of the Earth. How cool is that? The usual capture time for this technique according to him is 15 hours in freezing conditions, from sunset to sunrise.

                                        The post Lincoln Harrison’s Startrail Series appeared first on A Creative Blog.

Do you know what kanji is? They're basically Chinese characters mostly used in China, Japan, and Korea. I have taken Hapon 10 and 11 in UP and also studied in Japan, and for me, one of the most difficult things to do in learning Kanji is remembering the correct stroke order. (￣Д)＝３

I mean, even Japanese have a hard time remembering them.

What about you? Can you determine how to write the kanji for kanji （漢字） in the correct stroke order?

Wertheimer and some of his coleagues said that when two separated dots are flashed with the right timing, it will appear as if the dot is moving from one place to another (when it actually isn't), and this is called "apparent motion." Top-down factor like expectation and attention, as well as bottom-up factors like spot proximity affect people's perception of apparent motion, and Tse and Cavanagh conducted a study about how the previous knowledge (top-down) and grouping process (bottom-up) can affect one's perception of apparent movement.

They had 10 Chinese participants who were at least 18 when they arrived in America (not more than 10 years prior to the experiment), and 10 American participants who had no knowledge of the Chinese language. They were made to look at the fixation point and determine if the last stoke was written from left to right, right to left, or no motion at all. You can see the correct stroke order at (B). It is important to note that the stimuli (strokes) were presented with no motion.

The hypothesis of this study was that since the Chinese subjects have knowledge about how Chinese characters are written, they might perceive the motion of the final stroke to be from left to right even though there was no motion at all. However, Americans would perceive it as being written from right to left because of grouping processes, which will group it with the element near it (which is the 4th stroke's vertical line on the right side of the 6th stroke).

And ta dah! 7 out of 10 Chinese participants reported seeing left-to-right motion, and all of the Americans reported seeing right-to-left motion.

We can see in this study how both top-down and bottom-up factors affect how we perceive things in our environment. There are some people who believe that bottom-up processes have a larger contribution to how we perceive things, but this study shows that top-down processes also have a big impact on our perception. It even overrides the bottom-up processes like the grouping process in this study.

So don't underestimate the power of experience.

Reference: Tse, P.U., & Cavanagh, P. (2000). Chinese and Americans see opposite apparent motions in a Chinese character. Cognition, 74 (2000), B27-B32.

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