Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 18:52, 6 June 2007

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Visual perception" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

This article may require cleanup to meet Misplaced Pages's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can. (July 2006) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

v t e Psychology
History Philosophy Portal Psychologist
Basic psychology	Abnormal Affective neuroscience Affective science Behavioral genetics Behavioral neuroscience Behaviorism Cognitive/Cognitivism Cognitive neuroscience Social Comparative Cross-cultural Cultural Developmental Differential Ecological Evolutionary Experimental Gestalt Intelligence Mathematical Moral Neuropsychology Perception Personality Psycholinguistics Psychophysiology Quantitative Social Theoretical
Applied psychology	Anomalistic Applied behavior analysis Assessment Clinical Coaching Community Consumer Counseling Critical Educational Ergonomics Feminist Forensic Health Humanistic Industrial and organizational Legal Media Medical Military Music Occupational health Pastoral Political Positive Psychometrics Psychotherapy Religion School Sport and exercise Suicidology Systems Traffic
Methodologies	Animal testing Archival research Behavior epigenetics Case study Content analysis Experiments Human subject research Interviews Neuroimaging Observation Psychophysics Qualitative research Quantitative research Self-report inventory Statistical surveys
Concepts	Behavior Behavioral engineering Behavioral genetics Behavioral neuroscience Cognition Competence Consciousness Consumer behavior Emotions Feelings Human factors and ergonomics Intelligence Mind Psychology of religion Psychometrics Terror management theory
Psychologists	Wilhelm Wundt William James Ivan Pavlov Sigmund Freud Edward Thorndike Carl Jung John B. Watson Clark L. Hull Kurt Lewin Jean Piaget Gordon Allport J. P. Guilford Carl Rogers Erik Erikson B. F. Skinner Donald O. Hebb Ernest Hilgard Harry Harlow Raymond Cattell Abraham Maslow Neal E. Miller Jerome Bruner Donald T. Campbell Hans Eysenck Herbert A. Simon David McClelland Leon Festinger George A. Miller Richard Lazarus Stanley Schachter Robert Zajonc Albert Bandura Roger Brown Endel Tulving Lawrence Kohlberg Noam Chomsky Ulric Neisser Jerome Kagan Walter Mischel Elliot Aronson Daniel Kahneman Paul Ekman Michael Posner Amos Tversky Bruce McEwen Larry Squire Richard E. Nisbett Martin Seligman Ed Diener Shelley E. Taylor John Anderson Ronald C. Kessler Joseph E. LeDoux Richard Davidson Susan Fiske Roy Baumeister
Lists	Counseling topics Disciplines Organizations Outline Psychologists Psychotherapies Research methods Schools of thought Timeline Topics
Wiktionary definition Wiktionary category Wikisource Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikinews Wikibooks

In psychology, visual perception is the ability to interpret visible light information reaching the eyes which is then made available for planning and action. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight or vision. The various components involved in vision are known as the visual system.

Visual System

The visual system allows us to assimilate information from the environment to help guide our actions. The act of seeing starts when the lens of the eye focus an image of the outside world onto a light-sensitive membrane in the back of the eye, called the retina. The retina is actually part of the brain that is isolated to serve as a transducer for the conversion of patterns of light into neuronal signals. The lens of the eye focuses light on the photoreceptive cells of the retina, which detect the photons of light and respond by producing neural impulses. These signals are processed in a hierarchical fashion by different parts of the brain, such as the lateral geniculate nucleus, and the primary and secondary visual cortex of the brain.

Theoretical perspectives in the study of visual perception

The major problem in visual perception is that what people see is not simply a translation of retinal stimuli (i.e., the image on the retina). Thus people interested in perception have long struggled to explain what visual processing does to create what we actually see.

Unconscious inference

Hermann von Helmholtz is often credited with the founding of the scientific study of visual perception. Helmholtz held vision to be a form of unconscious inference: vision is a matter of deriving a probable interpretation for incomplete data.

Inference requires prior assumptions about the world: two well-known assumptions that we make in processing visual information are that light comes from above, and that objects are viewed from above and not below. The study of visual illusions (cases when the inference process goes wrong) has yielded a lot of insight into what sort of assumptions the visual system makes.

The unconscious inference hypothesis has recently been revived in so-called Bayesian studies of visual perception. Proponents of this approach consider that the visual system performs some form of Bayesian inference to derive a perception from sensory data. Models based on this idea have been used to describe various visual subsystems, such as the perception of motion or the perception of depth. An introduction can be found in Mamassian, Landy & Maloney (2002). See here for a non-mathematical tutorial on these general ideas.

Gestalt theory

Gestalt psychologists working primarily in the 1930s and 1940s raised many of the research questions that are studied by vision scientists today.

The Gestalt Laws of Organization have guided the study of how people perceive visual components as organized patterns or wholes, instead of many different parts. Gestalt is a German word that translates to "configuration or pattern". According to this theory, there are six main factors that determine how we group things according to visual perception: Proximity, Similarity, Closure, Symmetry, Common fate and Continuity.

The major problem with the Gestalt laws (and the Gestalt school generally) is that they are descriptive not explanatory. For example, one cannot explain how humans see continuous contours by simply stating that the brain "prefers good continuity". Computational models of vision have had more success in explaining visual phenomena and have largely superseded Gestalt theory.

See also

Template:CommonsCat

• Color vision
• Motion perception
• Depth perception
• Visual illusion

Disorders/Dysfunctions

• Achromatopsia
• Color blindness
• Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome

Related Disciplines

• Psychophysics
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Optometry
• Ophthalmology

Headline text

Headline text

Headline text

== Headline text== Bold text'Bold text'Bold text{| class="wikitable" |- ! header 1 ! header 2 ! header 3 |- | row 1, cell 1 | row 1, cell 2 | row 1, cell 3 |- | row 2, cell 1 | row 2, cell 2 | row 2, cell 3 |}

External links

• Empiristic theory of visual gestalt perception
• Visual Perception 3 - Cultural and Environmental Factors
• Visual Perception 4 - Individual Differences, Purposes and Needs
• Gestalt Laws
• Summary of Kosslyn et al.'s theory of high-level vision
• The Organization of the Retina and Visual System
• Dr Trippy's Sensorium A website dedicated to the study of the human sensorium and organisational behaviour

1. Computational models of contour integration, by Steve Dakin

• Articles needing cleanup from July 2006
• Cleanup tagged articles without a reason field from July 2006
• Misplaced Pages pages needing cleanup from July 2006
• Computer vision
• Psychology
• Vision