Visual Experience

de Gary Hatfield, Sarah Allred

"'Seeing' happens effortlessly and yet is endlessly complex. One of the most fascinating aspects of visual perception is its stability and constancy. As we shift our gaze or move about the world, the light projected onto the retinas is constantly changing . Yet the surrounding objects appear stable in their properties. Psychologists have long been interested in constancies, exploring questions such as: How good is constancy? Is constancy a fact about how things look, or is it a product of our beliefs and judgments about how things look? How can the contents of visual experience be studied experimentally? Philosophers have also long been interested in characterizing visual experience, but have only recently become widely interested in the constancies. As psychologists and philosophers have interacted, new questions have arisen: If experience is not fundamentally of the retinal image, but does not always exhibit constancy, how should this intermediate state be described? Is a new taxonomy needed to classify the several types of visual experience elicited by the same object? Should we regard any departure from constancy as a failure of the visual system, or might such a departure be a reasonable or adaptive response? How do seeing and believing interact to yield our visual experience? 'Visual Experiences' explores size constancy and color constancy. It considers methodologies for studying conscious visual perception, efforts to describe visual experience in relation to constancy, what it means that constancy is not always perfect, and the conceptual resources needed for explaining visual experience. This interdisciplinary book is a valuable resource for both vision scientists and philosophers of mind"--Publisher's description, back cover.