How People See

Geon:

Irving Biederman came up with the idea of geons in 1985. Geons, or geometric icons, are basic shapes that people look at to identify objects. It's thought that there are 24 basic shapes that we recognize and they form the building blocks of all the objects we see and identify.


FFA:

There is a special part of the brain outside the visual cortex whose sole purpose is to recognize faces. The fusiform face area (FFA), identified by Nancy Kanwisher in 1997, allows faces to bypass the brain's usual interpretive channels and helps us identify them more quickly than objects. Another interesting fact is that people with autism don't use the FFA when looking at faces. They use other, regular pathways in the brain and visual cortex that are normally used to recognize and interpret objects but not faces.


Canonical perspective:

Most people would draw an object from a perspective slightly above the object looking down, and offset a little to the right or left. This is known as the canonical perspective. Research has shown that people tend to recognize objects better at this perspective.


Affordance:

Affordances are cues that objects give users about how they should be used. James Gibson described affordances as action possibilities in the environment.