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Encyclopedia > Visiophone

Visual perception is one of the senses, consisting of the ability to detect light and interpret (see) it as the perception known as eyesight, sight or naked eye vision. Vision has a specific sensory system, the visual system. Prism splitting light Light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength that is visible to the eye (visible light) or, in a technical or scientific context, electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength. ... PSYCHOLOGY In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. ... A naked eye is a figure of speech, referring to human visual perception unaided by enhancing equipment such as a telescope or binoculars. ... This article or section may be confusing for some readers, and should be edited to be clearer or more simplified. ... The visual system is the part of the nervous system which allows organisms to see. ...

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There is disagreement as to whether or not this constitutes one, two or even three distinct senses. Some people make a distinction between "black and white" vision and the perception of color, and others point out that vision using rod cells uses different physical detectors on the retina from cone cells. Some argue that the perception of depth also constitutes a sense, but others argue that this is really cognition (that is, post-sensory) function derived from having stereoscopic vision (two eyes) and is not a sensory perception as such. Many people are also able to perceive the polarization of light. Psychology (ancient Greek: psyche = soul or mind, logos/-ology = study of) is an academic and applied field involving the study of the mind, brain, and behavior, both human and nonhuman. ... Image File history File links Human_brain_NIH.jpg NIH image of human brain Source: http://lbc. ... The history of psychology consists of a prescientific and a scientific epoch. ... A psychologist is a scientist who studies psychology, the systematic investigation of the human behavior and mental processes. ... The basic premise of applied psychology is the use of psychological principles and theories to overcome practical problems in other fields, such as business management, product design, ergonomics, nutrition or clinical medicine. ... Behaviorism or behaviourism (not to be confused with behavioralism in political science) is an approach to psychology based on the proposition that behavior can be researched scientifically without recourse to inner mental states. ... Biological psychology is the scientific study of the biological bases of behavior and mental states. ... Clinical psychology is the application of psychology to problematic mental distress in a health and social care context. ... Cognitive psychology is the psychological science that studies cognition, the mental processes that underlie behavior, including thinking, reasoning, decision making, and to some extent motivation and emotion. ... Hans Baldung Grien: The Ages And Death, c. ... Evolutionary psychology (abbreviated ev-psych or EP) is the claim that many mental capacities and faculties can be explained by considering them to be adaptations in an evolutionary biological sense, as traits or capacities whose natures can be explained as a product of natural selection. ... Experimental psychology is an approach to psychology that treats it as one of the natural sciences, and therefore assumes that it is susceptible to the experimental method. ... Gestalt psychology (also Gestalt theory of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies. ... Humanistic psychology is a school of psychology that emerged in the 1950s in reaction to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis. ... Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. ... Personality psychology is a branch of psychology which studies personality and individual different processes - that which makes us into a person. ... Psychophysics is the branch of cognitive psychology dealing with the relationship between physical stimuli and their perception. ... Social psychology is often conceived to be the study of how individuals perceive, influence, and relate to others. ... This list includes notable psychologists and contributors to psychology, some of whom may not have thought of themselves primarily as psychologists but are included here because of their important contributions to the discipline. ... This is a list of important publications in psychology, organized by field. ... link title Headline text --Cknuth7 16:35, 3 April 2006 (UTC) This page aims to list articles related to psychology. ... Color is an important part of the visual arts. ... Normalised absoption spectra of human rod (R) and cone (S,M,L) cells. ... Normalised absorption spectra of human cone (S,M,L) and rod (R) cells Cone cells, or cones, are cells in the retina of the eye which only function in relatively bright light. ... Look up Cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Stereoscopy, stereoscopic imaging or 3-D (three-dimensional) imaging is a technique to create the illusion of depth in a photograph, movie, or other two-dimensional image, by presenting a slightly different image to each eye. ... Simulated appearance of Haidingers brush for vertically polarized light. ...

Contents


The visual system

Human eyes
Human eyes

The eye is the light-sensitive organ that is the first component of the visual system. The brain receives ninety percent of its information from the eyes also. The eye's retina performs the first stages of visual perception processing, with the remaining stages of visual perception occurring in the optic nerve, the lateral geniculate nucleus, and the visual cortex of the brain. self-portrait with eyes Photo by C. Podles, winter 2003 File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... self-portrait with eyes Photo by C. Podles, winter 2003 File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... The visual system is the part of the nervous system which allows organisms to see. ... Human eye cross-sectional view. ... The optic nerve is the nerve that transmits visual information from the retina to the brain. ... Grays FIG. 719– Hind- and mid-brains; postero-lateral view. ... Visual cortex is the term applied to both the primary visual cortex (also known as striate cortex or V1) and upstream visual cortical areas also known as extrastriate cortical areas (V2, V3, V4, V5). ... Comparative brain sizes In animals, the brain, or encephalon (Greek for in the head), is the control center of the central nervous system. ...


Sources of information

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Sight

To perform its task, visual perception takes into account not only patterns of illumination on the retina, but also our other senses and our past experiences. Consider the task of bird sighting (an instance of object recognition): to be able to identify a bird against a background of tree and brushes, one needs prior exposure to general properties of the bird category. From past experiences, we expect birds to have a certain shape, color, etc. Hearing a sound that is characteristic of birds, a song for example, will help us locate one: information from the other senses is used in visual perception. In this case, locational information from the auditory domain is used. Image File history File links Commons-logo. ... The Wikimedia Commons (also called Commons or Wikicommons) is a repository of free content images, sound and other multimedia files. ... Multimodal integration, also known as multisensory integration, is the integration in the brain of inputs from the various senses, to form multimodal representations or percepts. ... Visual learning is a proven teaching method in which graphic organizers, such as webs, concept maps and idea maps, are used to help students of all ages think and learn more effectively. ... Birding or birdwatching is a hobby concerned with the observation and study of birds (the study proper is termed ornithology). ... Computer vision is the study of methods which allow computers to understand images, or multidimensional data in general. ... Orders Many - see section below. ... For Wikipedias categorization projects, see Wikipedia:Categorization. ...


Theoretical perspectives in the study of visual perception

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. Hermann von Helmholtz Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (August 31, 1821 – September 8, 1894) was a German physician and physicist. ... The scope of this article is limited to the empirical sciences. ... Inference is the act or process of drawing a conclusion based solely on what one already knows. ...


The general goal of vision is to identify, as accurately as possible, the features of our environment: roughly, what objects are present where. Other features are irrelevant to this task : illumination patterns, viewing position, etc. Those are confounding variables. Call S = (F,C) the scene, with F the features we’re interested in and C the confounding variables. S determines I, the pattern of illumination on the retina, which is all the information our visual system has on the current scene. The task is to find S given I. This problem is under-constrained: many different S correspond to the same I, and many I could correspond to the same S. One of the reasons is that much information is lost when a 3-dimensional world is collapsed into a 2-dimensional array.


To see why, consider the figure of a circle such as this one: O. It could correspond to an infinity of ellipses viewed at a certain slant. But we always interpret it as a circle viewed on the frontal plane – the explanation we infer from the data for this particular stimulus. The word infinity comes from the Latin infinitas or unboundedness. It refers to several distinct concepts which arise in theology, philosophy, mathematics and everyday life. ... Ellipses is the plural form of either of 2 words in the English language: Ellipse Ellipsis This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Two intersecting planes in R3 In mathematics, a plane is a fundamental two-dimensional object. ... The term stimulus (plural: stimuli) has several related meanings: In physiology, a stimulus is something external that elicits or influences a physiological or psychological activity or response. ...


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. An optical illusion is any illusion that deceives the human visual system into perceiving something that is not present or incorrectly perceiving what is present. ...


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 percept 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 [1] for an non-mathematical tutorial. Bayesian refers to probability and statistics -- either methods associated with the Reverend Thomas Bayes (ca. ... Bayesian inference is statistical inference in which evidence or observations are used to update or to newly infer the probability that a hypothesis may be true. ... In physics, motion means a change in the position of a body with respect to time, as measured by a particular observer in a particular frame of reference. ... Depth perception is the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions. ...


Gestalt

Gestalt psychologists have raised many of the research questions that are studied by vision scientists today. Gestalt psychology (also Gestalt theory of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies. ...


The Gestalt Laws of Organization have guided the study of how people perceive visual components as organized patterns or wholes, instead of many separate 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 – the objects closest together are more likely to form a group.
  • Similarity – objects similar in size or shape are more likely to form a group.
  • Closure – our brains add missing components to complete a larger pattern.
  • Symmetry – symmetrical items are more likely to group together.
  • Common fate – items moving in the same direction are more likely to group together.
  • Continuity – once a pattern is formed, it is more likely to continue even if the elements are redistributed.

Ecological psychology

Psychologist James J. Gibson developed a theoretical perspective on vision that is radically different from that of Helmholtz. Gibson considers that enough visual perception is available in normal environments to allow for veridical perception (accurate perception of the world). Gibson replaces inference with information pickup. Although most researchers today feel closer to Helmholtz's unconscious inference theory, Gibson has done much in identifying what sort of information is available to the visual system. J.J. Gibson (1904-1979) was an American psychologist, considered one of the most important 20th century psychologists in the field of visual perception. ...


Individual and group differences in visual perception

Most of the general processes of visual perception have been shown to be universal, as opposed to being dependant on culture, although there are specific instances where cultural variability appears to come into play.


It has also been shown that certain individual differences such as impairment of sight and spatial skills can also affect our visual perception. There are also other factors that influence how we perceive things such as personality, cognitive styles, gender, occupation, age, values, attitudes, motivation, religious beliefs, economic status, education, habits, etc. It has been suggested that Personality psychology be merged into this article or section. ... Cognitive Style Cognitive style is a term used in cognitive psychology to describe the way individuals think, perceive and remember information, or their preferred approach to using such information to solve problems. ... The word gender describes the state of being male, female, or neither. ... Value is a term that expresses the concept of worth in general, and it is thought to be connected to reasons for certain practices, policies or actions. ... See: Aircraft attitude Attitude (magazine) Attitude (album) Attitude (psychology) Propositional attitude This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...


References

Berkeley G (1709/1975) Philosophical works including works on vision. (Ayers, MR ed)London: Eveyman/J.M. Dent.


Mamassian, P., Landy, M. S. and Maloney, L. T. (2002). Bayesian Modelling of Visual Perception. In R. Rao, B. Olshausen and M. Lewicki (Eds.) Probabilistic Models of the Brain: Perception and Neural Function (pp. 13-36). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


Purves D, Lotto RB, Williams SM, Nundy S, Yang Z (2001) Why we see things the way we do: evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision. Phil Trans Roy Soc London B-Bio Sci 356:285-297.


Purves D, Lotto RB (2003) Why We See What We Do: An Empirical Theory of Vision. Sunderland MA: Sinauer Associates.


Purves D, Williams MS, Nundy S, Lotto RB (2004) Perceiving the intensity of light. Psychological Rev. Vol 111: 142-158.


Howe, Catherine Q., Purves, Dale (2005) Perceiving Geometry: Geometrical Illusions Explained by Natural Scene Statistics. New York, NY: Springer Publishing.


Rudolph Arnheim (1954). Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press.


Lothar Kleine-Horst (2001). Empiristic Theory of Visual Gestalt Perception. Hierarchy and Interactions of Visual Functions. Koeln: Enane. ISBN 3-928955-42X


See also

Types of visual perception

Color vision is the capacity of an organism or machine to distinguish objects based on the wavelength of the light they reflect or emit. ... Motion perception is the process of inferring the true velocity and direction of motion in a visual scene given some visual input. ... Depth perception is the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions. ...

Disorders/Dysfunctions

Maskun is a medical condition (also called achromatopsia) characterized by a low cone count or lack of function in cone cells; these are the light receptors responsible for colour perception. ... Color blindness in humans is the inability to perceive differences between some or all colors that other people can distinguish. ... Scotopic sensitivity syndrome, also known as Meares-Irlen syndrome or Irlen syndrome, is a broadly defined visual perceptual disorder affecting primarily reading and writing based activities. ...

Related Disciplines

Psychophysics is the branch of cognitive psychology dealing with the relationship between physical stimuli and their perception. ... Neuroscience is a field of study that deals with the structure, function, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, and pathology of the nervous system, consisting of the myriad nerve pathways running throughout the body. ... Rendering of human brain based on MRI data Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e. ... Optometry is the health care profession concerned with examination, diagnosis, and treatment of the eyes and related structures, and with determination and correction of vision problems using lenses and other optical aids [1]. An optometrist (Greek: optos meaning seen or visible and metria meaning measurement) is an eye care professional... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Other

Attentional Blink or AB is a phenomenon observed in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). ... Binocular rivalry is a phenomenon of visual perception in which perception alternates between different images presented to each eye. ... Examples of visually ambiguous patterns. ... Blindsight is residual visual sensitivity independent of any subjective experience of visual qualia. ... Brightness is an attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to emit a given amount of light. ... Contrast has several meanings: // Visual perception Left side of the image has low contrast, the right has higher contrast. ... Color is an important part of the visual arts. ... Color circle A color circle is a way of representing the visible spectrum in a circular form, with colors arranged in sequence around the circumference in order of spectral frequency. ... Color vision is the capacity of an organism or machine to distinguish objects based on the wavelength of the light they reflect or emit. ... Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ... Redness is the canonical quale. ... A corrective lens is a lens worn on or before the eye, used to treat myopia, hypermetropia, presbyopia and astigmatism. ... Entoptic phenomena are visual effects whose source is within the eye itself. ... Eye tracking is a technique used in cognitive science, psychology (notably psycholinguistics), human-computer interaction (HCI), advertising, medical research, and other areas. ... Face perception is the process by which the brain and mind understand and interpret the face, particularly the human face. ... The flicker fusion threshold is a concept in the psychophysics of vision. ... According to the theory of persistence of vision, the perceptual processes of the brain or the retina of the human eye retains an image for a brief moment of time. ... A pair of modern glasses A pair of more traditional glasses Glasses, spectacles, or eyeglasses are frames bearing lenses worn in front of the human eyes, sometimes for purely aesthetic reasons but normally for vision correction or eye protection. ... Night vision systems enabled the measurement of visual thresholds following World War II. The 1950s also marked a notable development in the performance modeling of night vision imaging systems. ... Optic flow is the perceived visual motion of objects as the observer moves relative to them. ... An optical illusion is characterized by visually perceived images that are deceptive or misleading [1]. Information gathered by the eye is processed by the brain to give a perception that does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source. ... Peripheral vision is a part of vision that occurs outside the very center of gaze. ... The phi phenomenon is a perceptual illusion described by Max Wertheimer in his 1912 Experimental Studies on the Seeing of Motion, in which a disembodied perception of motion is produced by a succession of still images. ... The philosophy of perception concerns how mental processes and symbols depend on the world internal and external to the perceiver. ... A phosphene is an entoptic phenomenon characterized by the experience of light without light coming into the eye. ... A photoreceptor is a specialized form of cell (specifically, neuron) that is capable of phototransduction. ... Pattern recognition is a field within the area of machine learning. ... Computer vision is the study and application of methods which allow computers to understand image content or content of multidimensional data in general. ... ... Repetition Blindness, like Attentional Blink is a phenomenon observed in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. ... A saccade is a fast movement of an eye, head, or other part of an animals body or of a device. ... Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes: The Dream, 1883 A girl sleeps in her bed, before reaching REM sleep. ... Figure 3 Three-neuron arc, during a head movement to the right. ... Traditional Snellen chart used for visual acuity testing. ... Visual cortex is the term applied to both the primary visual cortex (also known as striate cortex or V1) and upstream visual cortical areas also known as extrastriate cortical areas (V2, V3, V4, V5). ... The term visual field is sometimes used as a synonym to field of view, though they do not designate the same thing. ... The visual system is the part of the nervous system which allows organisms to see. ... Visual phototransduction is a process by which light is converted into electrical signals in the rod cells and cone cells of the retina of the eye. ...

External links

Nervous system - Sensory system - edit
Special sensesVisual system | Auditory system | Olfactory system | Gustatory system
Somatosensory systemNociception | Thermoreception | Vestibular system |
Mechanoreception (Pressure, Vibration & Proprioception)


 

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