Perception: Theories and Apparent Movement
Theories of perception
1) Theory of inference. It has its origins in the British empiricist philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hobbes, Locke or Hume, who argued that the mind at birth is a blank slate (tabula rasa) and that knowledge is acquired only by experience sensitive and the association of ideas. His greatest example is H. Von Helmholtz, who argued that perception is an inferential process based on (deductive) in which, through past experience, unconsciously infer the nature of these sensations. For example, when we see more distant objects smaller 2) Theory of Gestalt (form, shape, structure …). Heirs of philosophers like Descartes and Kant, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively (who argued that the human mind has innate ideas about the shape, size and other properties of objects), was conceived by the German psychologists (Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka) of Gestalt in the first decades of the twentieth century. They maintained that the brain organizes the various perceptions or sensations as unitary wholes, which is determined by laws innately given. A melody, for example, is not a mere sum of sounds, but is a quality based on the interrelationship of all sounds. Hence his famous slogan: the whole is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. 3) The theory of the stimulus. Associated with the tradition that seeks correlations between physical variables and the sensory, argues that all the information needed to explain our perception is present in the environment, and that for each type of perception there is a single stimulus or type of information tease. This approach was developed during the nineteenth century and was revived in the 40s of the twentieth century by JJ Gibson and his team of researchers, whose work program was to discover what are the main characteristics of each type of stimulus perception
The perception of apparent movement
1) persistence of vision.
Phenomenon described by Peter Mark Roger in 1824, this thesis states that when an image is formed on the retina by a light stimulus, the sensation remains when the stimulus ceases (and remains at least 1 / 15 second). This means that there is inertia in which retinal images are not deleted immediately, but remain a short period of time. 2) The effect Phi. First studied by Wertheimer in 1912, holds that when two identical images appear very next turn on the retina and at intervals of less than the persistence of vision, it induces the feeling of being in front of a moving object from one position to another. It is the second feature that enhances the sense of apparent motion (and determined together with the persistence of vision that the film cadence should be at least 16 frames per second)
Cinema
Despite the avalanche of patents and chronograph experiences that occurred during the late nineteenth century, most historians seem to have agreed it was Edison who first managed to impress perforated films, around 1891, while it was the Lumiere brothers (notably Louis) who managed to make the first public screenings in 1,895 successfully. We can summarize the historical landmarks of cinema in the following:
1891. Edison sold the Kinetoscope
1.895. Lumiere brothers made the first public.
1915. DW Griffith premieres The Birth of a Nation, which summarize the progress achieved in the cinematic language that had evolved since the origins of cinema (changes of size and angle plane, camera movement, space and time).
1927. Opens the first movie with sound: The Jazz Singer, in Alan Crosland. Before
she had done films with synchronized music, but the singer here and spoke directly.
1939. It imposes theater system color (Technicolor) with the blockbuster Gone with the Wind by Victor Fleming (Walt Disney while he experimented with color in a few years before their animations).
It premieres 1941 Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, who manages to synthesize the novel film resources that would provide each new movement or director. For technical complexity is the culmination of the evolution of cinematic language.