Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.
If you put a baseball and other toys in front of a baby, he'll pick up a baseball in preference to the others.
Yes, we have prototyped cars that can drive by themselves, but without smart vision, they cannot really tell the difference between a crumpled paper bag on the road, which can be run over, and a rock that size, which should be avoided.
The idea that a robot will become more aware of its environment, that telling it to 'go to the kitchen' means something - navigation and understanding of the environment is a robot problem. Those are the technological frontiers of the robotics industry.
When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience.
I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.
As commentators like the American psychologist Gary Marcus have noted, it's extremely difficult to teach a computer to recognise cats. And that's not for want of trying.
We're making progress, but getting machines to replicate our ability to perceive and manipulate the world remains incredibly hard.
When a driverless car looks out on the world, it's not able to distinguish the age of a pedestrian or the number of occupants in a car.
Pictures often sit inside of pictures, but the edges of pictures and objects are rarely subjected to serious challenge; we are presented with distinct, whole pictures and objects.
Yes, iD is a machine vision and sensor browser for the physical world. That's what we have been working on with Coca-Cola, Verizon, Bank of America and Disney to launch content when an image is recognised.
Psychology is still trying to explain the perception of the position of an object in space, along with its shape, size, and so on, and to understand the sensations of color.
If you look at eggs, you will see that each one is almost round but not quite ... Nature's way of distinguishing eggs from large golf balls.
I'd like somebody to breed a male, genus homo, who could go and fetch a 12" x 8" black suède purse lying in the middle of a white bedspread and not come back looking baffled and saying he couldn't find it.
