You don’t have to be a cat parent to know that cats are peculiar creatures with many weird habits. They love to sit in boxes and if you paint a circle on the floor, your cat is likely to sit right in the middle. A recent study is based on this cat habit to find out how cats perceive the world.
Perception is not easy to understand. For example, when we see a cat behind a picket fence, our perceptual system completes those parts of the cat that are not visible. Although no light from such portions reaches our retina, they are nonetheless visible.
These are examples from vision, but such completion happens in all senses. Take hearing, for example: When we hear a loud bang while listening to a tune, the auditory system continues to represent the tune even in that brief moment when the bang is the only thing we hear.
This phenomenon is called amodal completion and it is part of our ordinary perception. In real life, we seldom perceive an object without using amodal completion: we constantly acquire occlusion since objects are not completely transparent. Every time we see an object occluded by another object, we use amodal completion of the occluded parts of perceived objects.
These are examples from vision, but such completion happens in all senses. Take hearing, for example: When we hear a loud bang while listening to a tune, the auditory system continues to represent the tune even in that brief moment when the bang is the only thing we hear.
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Source: Psychology Today