Mary A. Peterson - Böcker

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 behavioural 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 organisation, 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.

From a barrage of photons, we readily and effortlessly recognize the faces of our friends, and the familiar objects and scenes around us. However, these tasks cannot be simple for our visual systems--faces are all extremely similar as visual patterns, and objects look quite different when viewed from different viewpoints. How do our visual systems solve these problems? The contributors to this volume seek to answer this question by exploring how analytic and holistic processes contribute to our perception of faces, objects, and scenes. The role of parts and wholes in perception has been studied for a century, beginning with the debate between Structuralists, who championed the role of elements, and Gestalt psychologists, who argued that the whole was different from the sum of its parts. This is the first volume to focus on the current state of the debate on parts versus wholes as it exists in the field of visual perception by bringing together the views of the leading researchers. Too frequently, researchers work in only one domain, so they are unaware of the ways in which holistic and analytic processing are defined in different areas. The contributors to this volume ask what analytic and holistic processes are like; whether they contribute differently to the perception of faces, objects, and scenes; whether different cognitive and neural mechanisms code holistic and analytic information; whether a single, universal system can be sufficient for visual-information processing, and whether our subjective experience of holistic perception might be nothing more than a compelling illusion. The result is a snapshot of the current thinking on how the processing of wholes and parts contributes to our remarkable ability to recognize faces, objects, and scenes, and an illustration of the diverse conceptions of analytic and holistic processing that currently coexist, and the variety of approaches that have been brought to bear on the issues.