A Brief Overview of the Inner and Outer Horizons of Percepti

Why This Matters

A Brief Overview of the Inner and Outer Horizons of Perception

This Gestalt theory of perception was presented by Hubert Dreyfus to argue his claim that it is not possible to exhibit intelligent behavior or anything like it without being embodied. Because of the body's ability to immediately give feedback to the mind about the environment, embodied beings are able to form anticipations and therefore act intelligently instead of perceiving the world as countless tiny bits of data (yikes).

The Distinction: Outer Horizon

The outer horizon describes the perception of contextual features (i.e. background, place in a sentence or song, etc) which helps organize stimuli and develop anticipations for pattern recognition.

The Distinction:

Inner Horizon

The inner horizon describes the "something-more-than-the-figure-is" or the parts of an object not directly affecting the sense organs, the hidden parts (i.e. words in a closed book, numbers and faces on a stacked deck of cards, etc...).

How The Horizons Affect Perception

• Without either, the world would be a mess of tiny bits of data. We would have to take every bit of incoming stimuli as equally important and relevant, and experience every instance of a kind before recognizing it as such.
• By allowing unimportant background data to be subverted to important data, the world becomes much more coherent.
• By anticipating the inner horizons of objects, it takes much less effort and time to recognize a book as a book (instead of inspecting each page of each book before determining it as such.

By Maddie Bannon

Here's a Classic Example:

Outer horizon:

What image is in the foreground..?

Works Cited

Dreyfus, Hubert L. "The Role of the Body in Intelligent Behavior." What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992. 235-55. Print.

Stokes, Dustin. Lecture. 7 April 2014

Another Example:

Inner horizon:

Sum

• The inner and outer horizon shape the anticipation of the patterns in the world, which in turn shapes our experience of it. Each are crucial and utilized unconsciously (for the most part).
• The use of the inner and outer horizons stems from the human ability for pattern recognition which enables efficient and intelligent navigation of the world.

Would you perceive this as a facade or a house with rooms, objects inside...?