Foundations of Visual Perception

This chapter consists of three tutorial overviews of important theoretical and methodological issues in the field of visual perception: First we discuss eight foundational questions that have shaped the principal theoretical approaches to visual perception. We consider the functions of vision, the relationship between percepts and visual neurons, the concept of information, the notion of representation and representational transformation, the relationship between perception and cognition, the concept of modularity and the place of illusions in perceptual theory. Second we consider psychophysics, taking the reader from the simplest threshold theory to the theory of signal detection. We compare four threshold models: fixed energy threshold—naive observer, fixed energy threshold—guessing observer, variable energy threshold—guessing observer, and variable energy threshold—variable guessing rate. Then, we review the concept of receiver operating characteristic and conclude by examining the application of psychophysical methods in contemporary investigations. Third we discuss environmental regularities, how they may be discovered and related to perceptual regularities. We trace how the notion of redundancy reduction has evolved into the notion of redundancy exploitation, leading to the method of covariational analysis. Then we examine how covariational analysis is used to link the statistics of contours in natural images to the characteristics of perceptual organization. Keywords: constructivism; environmental regularities; optical covariation; realism; representational transformation; signal detection; threshold theories

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