Available again, an influential book that offers a framework for understanding visual perception and considers fundamental questions about the brain and its functions.
David Marr's posthumously published Vision (1982) influenced a generation of brain and cognitive scientists, inspiring many to enter the field. In Vision, Marr describes a general framework for understanding visual perception and touches on broader questions about how the brain and its functions can be studied and understood. Researchers from a range of brain and cognitive sciences have long valued Marr's creativity, intellectual power, and ability to integrate insights and data from neuroscience, psychology, and computation. This MIT Press edition makes Marr's influential work available to a new generation of students and scientists.
In Marr's framework, the process of vision constructs a set of representations, starting from a description of the input image and culminating with a description of three-dimensional objects in the surrounding environment. A central theme, and one that has had far-reaching influence in both neuroscience and cognitive science, is the notion of different levels of analysis—in Marr's framework, the computational level, the algorithmic level, and the hardware implementation level.
Now, thirty years later, the main problems that occupied Marr remain fundamental open problems in the study of perception. Vision provides inspiration for the continuing efforts to integrate knowledge from cognition and computation to understand vision and the brain.
‘Individual’ (cá nhân) came to the
Vietnamese language in the first decades of the twentieth century, along
with a host of other evocative neologisms, such as ‘society’
(xã hôi), ‘ethnic group/nation’
(dân tôc), ‘ideology’
(chu' nghĩa), ‘democracy’ (dân
chu' chu' nghĩa), ‘science’
(khoa hoc), and ‘progress’ (tiêń
hóa). Initially, ‘individual’ was very much the poor
relation among these new concepts—merely an irreducible human unit
belonging to something else more significant. Thus, each individual was
urged to be a loyal citizen of the nation, an eager participant in some new
political organization, or a responsible member of society. Individuals were
often compared with cells in the body, each one having a legitimate role in
sustaining and enhancing the vitality of the organism, but meaningless and
incapable of surviving on their own. On the other hand, the danger also
existed of individuals acting in a selfish, short-sighted manner, which
could jeopardize the larger order of things. Such persons were said to be
witting or unwitting perpetrators of ‘individualism’
(cá nhân chu' nghĩa).
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