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CHAPTER OUTLINE

WHAT IS THE USE OF PERCEPTION?

O n a warm Saturday some years ago, two young men – we’ll call them Processing and using incoming sensory
information
Alex and Simon – left their homes for a day’s hunting trip. As they Five functions of perception
walked along an abandoned road, their conversation touched on various ATTENTION
hunting-related topics, but mostly they talked about bears. Alex had seen a Selective attention
Auditory attention
bear the previous weekend, and both men were apprehensive about these
Attention, perception, and memory
dangerous creatures. They knew that their hunting rifles were powerful, but Costs and benefits of selectively attend-
ing to stimuli
they were well aware that bears were equally powerful. The hunters main-
tained a constant vigil. CUTTING EDGE RESEARCH:
DISTRACTION VIA VIRTUAL REALITY
It was almost midnight by the time Alex and Simon retraced their path along DIMINISHES SEVERE PAIN

the road bound for home. There was no moon; the forest was quiet and dark. LOCALIZATION
The two hunters were tired from their day’s efforts. As they rounded a curve, Separation of objects
Perceiving distance
they suddenly became aware of a low growling sound which they perceived to
Perceiving motion
come from a large, dimly illuminated animal quivering slowly but ominously in
RECOGNITION
the middle of the road, about 50 meters away. Terrified, they raised their rifles Global-to-local processing
and fired. The growling noise and the quivering abruptly ceased. An instant The binding problem: pre-attentive and
attentive processes
later an unmistakably human scream pierced the night. The hunters’ relief at Determining what an object is
having killed the bear was replaced by confusion and dismay as they realized Later stages of recognition: network
models
that the bear wasn’t a bear at all. It was a tent in which had dwelt two campers. Recognizing natural objects and
One of the campers now lay dead from a bullet wound, while the other knelt top-down processing
Special processing of socially relevant
above him, wailing in horror. stimuli: face recognition
Investigation carried out in the aftermath of this terrible event revealed that Failure of recognition

Simon’s bullets had passed harmlessly through the tent; it was one of the ABSTRACTION
Exact to abstract
bullets from Alex’s gun that killed the camper. Accordingly, Alex went to trial,
The advantages of abstraction: required
accused of negligent homicide. The tragedy of the killing was mirrored in the storage and processing speed

courtroom by Alex’s overwhelming sorrow about what had happened. There PERCEPTUAL CONSTANCIES

was one critical fact, however, about which both Alex and Simon were certain:
They had perceived a bear, not a tent that night. ‘We never would have shot if
we had had any idea that it wasn’t a bear’, they both swore. The prosecutor
dismissed these assertions as ridiculous and desperate lies: The bullet-riddled
tent itself was placed in the center of the courtroom and the prosecutors asked
the jury, ‘How could the defendant
have possibly mistaken this rectangular
yellow tent for a furry brown bear?’
How indeed? On the face of it, the
prosecution’s question seems quite
reasonable. There, sitting in the court-
room, for all to behold, was a big
© The McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, Photo by Jon C. Pascal
The nature of constancies
Color and brightness constancy
Shape constancy
Size constancy
Illusions
Constancies in all sensory modalities
DIVISIONS OF LABOR IN THE BRAIN
The neural basis of attention
The visual cortex
Recognition versus localization systems
PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT
Discrimination by infants
Controlled stimulation
SEEING BOTH SIDES: IS
PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT AN
INNATE OR SOCIALLY ACQUIRED
PROCESS?
151

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152 CHAPTER 5 PERCEPTION

Figure 5.1 Raw Data and the Resulting Perception. Left panel: Do you see a meaningful object? (Look at Figure 5-38 on page 193 if
you need help.) Right panel: What does the phrase say?

yellow tent, appearing not at all similar to a bear. How- ‘I love Paris’ statement really say what you thought it did?
ever, a half-century’s research on perception – visual Look at it again, this time reading it very slowly and
perception in this instance – suggests that under the cir- word-by-word. You will see that it actually says, ‘I love
cumstances, it wasn’t at all unreasonable for Simon and Paris in the the Springtime’. What about those meaning-
Alex to have perceived the tent to be a bear. In this less blobs in the left panel of Figure 5.1? Look at the
chapter we will elaborate on why this is so, demonstrating picture on page 193 and return here when you’ve done so.
in the process how the raw sensations that we discussed in Are you back? The left panel of Figure 5.1 is no longer
Chapter 4 become translated into the perceptions that are meaningless, is it? Indeed, if you are like most people, it is
directly responsible for our behavior. difficult for you to believe that it ever was meaningless.
To get a feel for what we mean by this, let’s start with a The stimulus entering your eyes is identical to what it was
couple of demonstrations. Look first at the left panel of before, but the perception is entirely different: The black-
Figure 5.1. Do you recognize an object? If you are like and-white blobs are now organized into a meaningful
most people (and have not seen this demonstration pre- object.
viously), your answer would be, ‘No’. Now look at the These demonstrations are designed to convince you
right panel of Figure 5.1. What does it say? Again if that while information may enter our senses in bits and
you’re normal and haven’t seen this demonstration pieces, that is not how we perceive the world. We perceive
before, you probably read, ‘I LOVE PARIS IN THE SPRINGTIME’. a world of objects and people, a world that gracefully
In both cases you had perceptions, of meaningless black- presents us with integrated wholes, rather than chaoti-
and-white blobs in one instance and of a common cliché cally bombarding us with piecemeal sensations. Only
in the other, that somehow derived from the basic, under unusual circumstances, or when we are drawing or
objective stimulus, that is the light that entered your painting, do we notice the individual features and parts of
eyes and fell on your retina. In both instances, however, stimuli; most of the time we see three-dimensional objects,
there are interesting and systematic disconnects between hear words and music, taste and smell the frying fish and
the raw data and the ensuing perception. Does that chips, and feel a hand on our arm.

WHAT IS THE USE OF associated sophistication of the solutions depend on the

nature and complexity of the organism. If you are a
PERCEPTION? daffodil, for example, the problems you must deal with
are relatively simple. You must figure out where
your roots should go on the basis of the soil structure
Any living organism must solve an unending series of you’re planted in, determining in the process, the soil’s
problems presented to it by the environment within texture, along with the distribution within the soil
which it dwells. The complexity of the problems and of moisture and nutrients. Additionally you must

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determine which way to orient yourself on the basis of
where the sun is.
But that’s about it for daffodils. Humans, it won’t
surprise you to hear, are quite a bit more complex. With
respect to perception, the most important differences
between daffodils and humans are these: First a human is
mobile: The vast majority of us must make our way
through the environment, determining in the process, the
potential routes that we could take and the obstacles that
must be surmounted for each route. Second, a human
manipulates objects: We turn the steering wheel on a car,
sign our names with a pen, and kick a ball toward the
goal. Third, a human makes decisions on the basis of
symbols such as written or spoken words or hiero-
glyphics. Fourth, a human makes and executes complex
plans to deal with sudden unexpected events: upon
glimpsing a sinister form in a dark alley, we evaluate our
options and cross to the other side of the street where we
can seek safety in the crowd that has gathered there.
Processing and using incoming sensory
information
How do we do this? One possibility is that the informa-
tion from the environment – in the case of vision, the
environment’s two-dimensional representation on our
retina – is all that is really necessary to live a normal life.
The American J. J. Gibson offered a theory of ecological
optics, which specified just that. According to Gibson, the
vast richness of optical information from the world – the
change in texture with distance, the shifting of objects’
images relative to one another as one walks by them, and
so on – is sufficient to solve all vision-related problems
that the world presents us.
Although ingenious, sophisticated and useful. Gibson’s
theory has been rejected by most perception scientists as
insufficient. Instead, it is argued, humans require a con-
tinually updated image or a model of the environment
within our brains, and it is then based on that model that
humans perceive, make decisions, and behave. Two
ingredients are necessary to formulate and maintain such
a model. The first is some means of acquiring raw
information about the environment. In Chapter 4, we
discussed how our sense organs are used to accomplish
this. But acquiring raw information is not sufficient to
build a model, any more than acquiring a stack of wood is
sufficient to build a house. In addition, we need a means
of organizing all this raw information into some kind of
coherent structure.
Such organization is not simple. Most basically, per-
ception of the world involves solving what is referred to
as the many-to-one problem. Illustrated in vision, this
problem boils down to the mathematical necessity that
many configurations of objects in the environment all give
rise to the same representation on the retina. Later in this
chapter we will have quite a bit more to say about this.
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WHAT IS THE USE OF PERCEPTION? 153
For the moment, to illustrate, think of seeing a pine tree in
the distance. A 2-meter-high tree seen from a distance of
100 meters would produce the same-size retinal image as
a 4-meter-high tree seen from a distance of 200 meters (as
would an infinite number of other height–distance com-
binations). The many-to-one problem entails deciding,
based on the one retinal image, which of the infinite
possible size–distance configurations gives rise to the
retinal image. The visual system must solve this problem
by using other information – both information already
stored in the brain (e.g., these trees are Christmas trees
which are generally 2-meter rather than 4-meter trees)
and additional visual cues (e.g., the person standing next
to the tree is about the same height as the tree).
More generally, making inferences from the sensory
data back to the state of the environment that gave rise to
the data requires assumptions about how the world is put
together – birds are usually to be found above horses,
stoves are usually to be found near refrigerators, a scene is
usually illuminated by a single kind of light source, and so
on. Thus, perception is the use of such assumptions to
integrate incoming sensory information into a model of
the world, based upon which we make decisions and take
action. Usually this process works pretty efficiently and,
for example, a yellow tent in the environment produces a
model – a perception – of a yellow tent in our mind.
Sometimes it doesn’t work so well: A yellow tent in the
environment produces the perception of a bear in our
mind, and we shoot it. Generally speaking, each sensory
modality – seeing, hearing, and so on – has both a sense
organ involved in acquiring the raw information from the
environment and a more central system in the brain for
transforming this information into organized percepts.
Five functions of perception
Perception is sufficiently complex that any classification
of it must be somewhat arbitrary. For organizational
purposes, however, it is useful to divide perceptual issues
into five categories. First via the process of attention a
decision must be made about which incoming informa-
tion is to be further processed, and which is to be dis-
carded (should I be eavesdropping on the conversation on
my left which seems to be about my spouse or the con-
versation on my right which seems to involve cricket
scores?). Second, the system must be able to determine
where objects of interest are (is that potentially dangerous
object at arm’s length, on my left, hundreds of meters
straight ahead, or where?). Third, the perceptual system
must be able to determine which objects are out there (is
that a tent or a bear that I’m looking at?). Fourth, the
system must be able to abstract the critical features of a
recognized object (a couch that has wrinkles and bumps
in it would be reasonably perceived and described as
‘rectangular’ even though its shape isn’t a perfect rect-
angle). This abstraction ability is closely related to the