https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/all...wrong.html
EXCERPT: This week could safely be described as the week of Laurel vs. Yanny, the week that the “audio version of the dress” took over the internet. After the ambiguous shoe, the Adidas jacket, and the dresser, not to forget the jumping pylons, you could be forgiven to suffer from #thedress fatigue. And yet, this one spread like wildfire because it is something new. This time, you could hear it!
[...] Consider this example of “phantom words,” which were pioneered by Diana Deutsch. [...] How many interpretations can you come up with? I counted more than 50, from “real well” to “bueno” to “no way,” “nowhere,” “railway,” “mailman,” “random,” “nowhere,” and so on. The reason for this remarkable ability to find meaning in poorly constrained stimuli is that the physical stimulus is consistent with many interpretations, allowing the brain the degrees of freedom for expectations and subjective biases to take over.
[...] Does this mean that the Laurel/Yanny thing is uninteresting and old hat? Not at all—on the contrary. I must confess that this is the first time in my life that I’m enthusiastically excited about speech perception. The reason for this is that in all examples we gave so far, the experience is fairly predictable—an impoverished physical stimulus is largely open to interpretation and disambiguated by expectations stemming from context and experience. But why does the subjective experience here cluster into such radically different experiences? And why can they shift back and forth?
This is where the lessons from the dress come in again. In 2015, the idiosyncratic experience of radically divergent percepts was puzzling. It took years to establish that there is a common three steps to perception that can account for the perception of the dress, and probably other phenomena:
1. Perception is fundamentally a guess. It just doesn’t feel like that because the brain tells you that it is “sure” about its interpretation at any given point.
2. Because it is a guess, it can be wrong. In particular if the sensory evidence is weak, the brain will rely more on assumptions (derived from prior experience). For instance, it can be shown that people rely on stereotypes to predict behavior most strongly when they know nothing else about a person. Once they get to know them, the new evidence dominates, a process known as “individuation.”
3. Because life experience differs between people, these assumptions—and consequently the conclusions or interpretations—differ too.
[...] This brings us the last take-home message: We live in a more idiosyncratic subjective world—one that allows for radically different interpretations—than we commonly realize. The dress suggested that this is true for color vision, and Laurel/Yanny suggests that this is more generally true. The worrisome part about all of this is subjective overconfidence....
MORE: https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/all...wrong.html
EXCERPT: This week could safely be described as the week of Laurel vs. Yanny, the week that the “audio version of the dress” took over the internet. After the ambiguous shoe, the Adidas jacket, and the dresser, not to forget the jumping pylons, you could be forgiven to suffer from #thedress fatigue. And yet, this one spread like wildfire because it is something new. This time, you could hear it!
[...] Consider this example of “phantom words,” which were pioneered by Diana Deutsch. [...] How many interpretations can you come up with? I counted more than 50, from “real well” to “bueno” to “no way,” “nowhere,” “railway,” “mailman,” “random,” “nowhere,” and so on. The reason for this remarkable ability to find meaning in poorly constrained stimuli is that the physical stimulus is consistent with many interpretations, allowing the brain the degrees of freedom for expectations and subjective biases to take over.
[...] Does this mean that the Laurel/Yanny thing is uninteresting and old hat? Not at all—on the contrary. I must confess that this is the first time in my life that I’m enthusiastically excited about speech perception. The reason for this is that in all examples we gave so far, the experience is fairly predictable—an impoverished physical stimulus is largely open to interpretation and disambiguated by expectations stemming from context and experience. But why does the subjective experience here cluster into such radically different experiences? And why can they shift back and forth?
This is where the lessons from the dress come in again. In 2015, the idiosyncratic experience of radically divergent percepts was puzzling. It took years to establish that there is a common three steps to perception that can account for the perception of the dress, and probably other phenomena:
1. Perception is fundamentally a guess. It just doesn’t feel like that because the brain tells you that it is “sure” about its interpretation at any given point.
2. Because it is a guess, it can be wrong. In particular if the sensory evidence is weak, the brain will rely more on assumptions (derived from prior experience). For instance, it can be shown that people rely on stereotypes to predict behavior most strongly when they know nothing else about a person. Once they get to know them, the new evidence dominates, a process known as “individuation.”
3. Because life experience differs between people, these assumptions—and consequently the conclusions or interpretations—differ too.
[...] This brings us the last take-home message: We live in a more idiosyncratic subjective world—one that allows for radically different interpretations—than we commonly realize. The dress suggested that this is true for color vision, and Laurel/Yanny suggests that this is more generally true. The worrisome part about all of this is subjective overconfidence....
MORE: https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/all...wrong.html