William James, the father of American Psychology, famously speculated that when a newborn child has her first sensory experience with the world outside of her mother’s womb, it must be “a great blooming, buzzing confusion” (James, 1890). All that sensory information, all that light, sound, taste, smell, texture, etc., continuously bombards us day and night. Our brain has the difficult task of learning how to organize all of it so that we can understand the world around us.

Studying how we do all of this – how we sense the world and how we understand and interpret that sensory information (called perception) — has a long history in psychology. In fact, the very first psychology experiment, conducted by Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of the discipline, was an attempt to measure the speed of perception.

Consider what the brain is confronted with even in a relatively simple task like recognizing an object, say a coffee mug. One of the more influential theories of how we do this is called Recognition by Components or RBG theory, proposed by Irving Biederman in 1987. Biederman said we separate or segment the object into simple geometric shapes (cones, wedges, or blocks for example) and then compare these “primitives” with information we have stored in memory to come up with the identification of the object. We do this with objects we’re very familiar with (like coffee mugs) as well as with objects we’ve never encountered before (Biederman, 1987). Breaking things down into simpler parts makes understanding them easier.

We don’t need very many of these primitive forms to understand an enormous array of visual objects (Biederman proposed fewer than 36 were needed), just like we only need a small number of speech phonemes........

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