Have you ever wondered why, at times, when looking at a bunch of dots that seem to have no more significance than a random arrangement, you are able to spot a pattern of a familiar object solely based on the individual dots? When taking a closer look at how the brain perceives these dots, it has been recognized that these shapes are not physically present in the dots, but rather the visual system abstracts over details along the contours of these dots to then form an image your brain recognizes as familiar.
In the talk by Nicholas Baker during a Neuroscience Seminar, the topic was how our brains can see a shape even when there are only separate dots with no lines connecting the dots together. "Shape from Dots, A Window into Abstraction Processes in Visual Perception" was a study conducted by Nicholas Baker and Philip Kellman (2024) through a series of 4 experiments using displays made of dots. Over the course of the 4 experiments, the study found that our brains are good at taking separate pieces of information, such as individual dots, and arranging them into a bigger, more organized shape. Our brains tend to prefer smoother arrangements of dots because they were easier for people to recognize, remember, and compare rather than the arrangements with sharper patterns, thus suggesting our brains look for a relationship between the individualized segments to then form a contoured outline rather than seeing the segments as their own.
In the National Geographic article titled "These Tiny Organisms Have Some Really Weird Shapes," by Liz Langley, we see examples of microscopic organisms with unusual shapes ranging from spiky water fleas to bacteriophages that resemble tiny lunar landers. These examples raise the question of how one actually recognizes and makes sense of the different shapes. What conclusion has been made to consider these shapes as "unusual"? When we look at these microorganisms, we do not just see separate parts; we see a whole that is made up of those separate parts. In one of the experiments conducted in the study, it was shown that our brains preferred arrangements of dots that were smoother and more uniform as opposed to sharper or more irregular arrangements. We can consider these shapes "unique" because of how their different features are arranged to create a distinctive overall shape.
Nature is all around us and a part of us. When we look at the organisms around us, their shapes are one of the first things we notice, but those shapes are created by how their individual parts are arranged. Both the study and the National Geographic article show us how important shape is in the way we understand the world around us through our perception. The experiments found that when people were shown different arrangements of dots, smoother arrangements were easier to recognize, remember, and compare than sharper or more irregular arrangements, thus suggesting that our brains look at the relationships between individual elements and organize them into a larger shape. We can see a real-world example of this occurring in the National Geographic article, where microorganisms such as Daphnia develop spikes, which stand out because of how their individual features come together to create the overall shape. Whether we are looking at a few dots on a screen or through the lens of a microscope, our brains are constantly putting individual segments together to help us understand the bigger picture through perception.
Works Cited
Baker, Nicholas, and Philip J. Kellman. “Shape from Dots: A Window into Abstraction Processes in Visual Perception.” *Frontiers in Computer Science*, vol. 6, 2024, article 1367534. *Frontiers*, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2024.1367534.
Langley, Liz. “These Tiny Organisms Have Some Really Weird Shapes.” *National Geographic*, 12 Nov. 2016, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/bacteria-tiny-microscopic-shapes.
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