Practical: It is extraordinarily difficult to isolate our perceptual experiences from our judgements about them.Also a commitment to viewing ‘the organism’ holistically (Goldstein, 1934) has continued to have influence. Although the cognitive revolution of the 1950s emphasised the importance of perception, it nonetheless remained tied to cognition under the catch-all term ‘perceptual judgement’.

Historical: Under behaviourism, perception was equated with ‘discrimination’ (see Miller, 2003).

This distinction is not one that vision science has traditionally embraced. In this initial post I want to use the problem of inconsistency to introduce the distinction between ‘perception’ and ‘cognition’ that runs through my book. In the case of the accounts marked with a *, 3D vision is refined for action in, rather than knowledge of, the environment (reflecting a more general ‘pragmatic turn’ in cognitive science: see Engel et al., 2013 Engel et al., 2016). Representational accounts struggle to fully address these concerns, and so in recent years a number of alternative accounts of 3D vision have emerged:Īpart from Direct Realism and Representationalism, the common theme is a shift away from the veridical representation of the 3D properties of the physical environment (see Albertazzi et al., 2010 Wagemans, 2015).

Inconsistency: The 3D properties of an object or scene can vary depending on the question being asked or the task being performed.

Inconstancy: The 3D properties of an object or scene can vary depending on (a) the distance it is viewed from, and (b) whether it is viewed with one eye or two.

If you think of 3D vision in Representational terms (as the extraction and representation of the 3D properties of the physical environment), it would appear that most of the interesting questions have been resolved and the discipline is in decline.Īnd yet 3D vision remains plagued by two fundamental concerns: In the space of 20 years it has gone from being a central concern of predictive models of the brain (Knill & Richards, 1996) to not being mentioned at leading conferences ( ). In this first post I outline the two major concerns of 3D vision: (1) inconstancy, and (2) inconsistency, and suggest that inconsistency can be avoided by reformulating the perception/cognition boundary.ģD vision is going through a period of transition. I want to thank John Schwenkler for inviting me to blog about my new book The Perception and Cognition of Visual Space (Palgrave, 2018).

Space perception definition