Understanding vision in wholly empirical terms
- 7 March 2011
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 108 (supplement), 15588-15595
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1012178108
Abstract
This article considers visual perception, the nature of the information on which perceptions seem to be based, and the implications of a wholly empirical concept of perception and sensory processing for vision science. Evidence from studies of lightness, brightness, color, form, and motion all indicate that, because the visual system cannot access the physical world by means of retinal light patterns as such, what we see cannot and does not represent the actual properties of objects or images. The phenomenology of visual perceptions can be explained, however, in terms of empirical associations that link images whose meanings are inherently undetermined to their behavioral significance. Vision in these terms requires fundamentally different concepts of what we see, why, and how the visual system operates.Keywords
This publication has 32 references indexed in Scilit:
- An Empirical Explanation of the Speed-Distance EffectPLOS ONE, 2009
- An empirical explanation of aperture effectsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- An empirical explanation of the flash-lag effectProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008
- The Bayesian brain: the role of uncertainty in neural coding and computationTrends in Neurosciences, 2004
- Illusions, perception and BayesNature Neuroscience, 2002
- Motion illusions as optimal perceptsNature Neuroscience, 2002
- Sparse coding with an overcomplete basis set: A strategy employed by V1?Vision Research, 1997
- “On the Visually Perceived Direction of Motion” by Hans Wallach: 60 Years LaterPerception, 1996
- Orientation dependence of human line-length judgements matches statistical structure in real-world scenesProceedings Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 1993
- Stimulus configuration and line orientation in the horizontal-vertical illusionPerception & Psychophysics, 1974