Celebrating the Usefulness of Pictorial Information in Visual Perception


Book Description

This book is a collection of biographical essays describing the influence of Julian Hochberg, a leading researcher in vision science and human performance modeling. In this chapter, Jeremy Beer, who was Hochberg's doctoral student, describes three areas in which Hochberg's experimental approach remains influential in vision research. The first area comprises the comparison of motion information versus pictorial depth cues (e.g., linear perspective, relative size) in moving viewers' perception of distance and slant. Hochberg demonstrated that pictorial cues can overcome other sources of information to determine how viewers will perceive a three-dimensional scene. These principles continue in the design of modern cockpit displays incorporating features like "highway in the sky." The second area comprises the comparison of motion information versus pictorial cues in the perception of time-to-collision. As in the first topic, recent work has demonstrated that pictorial cues can dominate other kinds of information in important visually controlled tasks such as vehicle braking and interceptive action. The third area comprises the effects of display boundaries on the perception of extended scenes. Recent work in this field has determined that human operators perceive scenes according to a distorted geometry when the boundaries of the display are restricted. (3 figures, 13 refs.).




In the Mind's Eye


Book Description

How can we best describe the processes by which we visually perceive our environment? Contemporary perceptual theory still lacks a coherent theoretical position that encompasses both the limitations on the information that can be retained from a single eye fixation and the abundant phenomenal and behavioral evidence for the perception of an extended and coherent world. As a result, many leading theorists and researchers in visual perception are turning with new or renewed interest to the work of Julian Hochberg. For over 50 years, in his own experimental research, in his detailed consideration of examples drawn from a wide range of visual experiences and activities, and most of all in his brilliant and sophisticated theoretical analyses, Hochberg has persistently engaged with the myriad problems inherent in working out the kind of coherent theoretical position the field currently lacks. The complexity of his thought and the wide range of areas into which Hochberg has pursued the solution to this central problem have, however, limited both the accessibility of his work and the appreciation of his accomplishment. In this volume we seek to bring the full range of Hochberg's work to the attention of a wider audience by offering a selection of his key works, many taken from out-of-print or relatively inaccessible sources. To facilitate the understanding of his accomplishment, and of what his work has to offer to contemporary researchers and theorists in visual perception, we include commentaries on salient aspects of his work by 20 noted researchers. In the Mind's Eye will be of interest to researchers working on topics such as perceptual organization, visual attention, space perception, motion perception, visual cognition, the relationship between perception and action, picture perception, and film, who are striving to obtain a deeper understanding of their own fields, and who want to integrate this understanding into a broader, unified view of visual perceptual processing.




The Perception of Pictures


Book Description

Durer's Devices: Beyond the Projective Model of Pictures is a collection of papers that discusses the nature of picture making and perception. One paper presents a perceptual theory of pictorial representation in which cultural and historical options in styles of depiction that appear to be different are actually closely related perceptually. Another paper discusses pictorial functions and perceptual structures including pictorial representation, perceptual theory, flat canvass, and the deep world. One paper suggests that perception can be more a matter of information "make up" than "pick up." Light becomes somewhat informative and the eye, correspondingly, becomes less or more presumptive. Another paper notes that human vision is transformed by our modes of representation, that image formation can be essentially incomplete, false, or misleading (primarily as regards dramatic performance and pictorial representation). One paper makes three claims that: (1) the blind have untapped depiction abilities; (2) haptics, involving the sense of touch, have an intuitive sense of perspective; and (3) depiction is perceptual based on graphic elements and pictorial configurations. The collection is suitable for psychologists, physiologists, psychophysicists, and researchers in human perception or phenomenology.