Solving the "real" mysteries of visual perception: The world as an outside memory.

Abstract

Visual science is currently a highly active domain, with much progress being made in fields such as colour vision, stereo vision, perception of brightness and contrast, visual illusions, etc. But the "real" mystery of visual perception remains comparatively unfathomed, or at least relegated to philosophical status: Why it is that we can see so well with what is apparently such a badly constructed visual apparatus?In this paper I will discuss several defects of vision and the classical theories of how they are overcome. 1 will criticize these theories and suggest an alternative approach, in which the outside world is considered as a kind of external memory store which can be accessed instantaneously by casting one's eyes (or one's attention) to some location. The feeling of the presence and extreme richness of the visual world is, under this view, a kind of illusion, created by the immediate availability of the information in this external store.

The Neural-Cognitive Basis of the Jamesian Stream of Thought

“…The intriguing question is: What kind of representation do we have of the unattended parts of the scene? Despite radical claims to the contrary (O'Regan, 1992) we do seem to have a conscious experience the part of the scene we cannot report, just as we seem to have a conscious experience of the song playing in our head before we attend to it. In the case of the scene, the unattended material is literally in the background.…”

Orienting of attention in left unilateral neglect

“…For example, our consciousness of the presence of an object on our left would principally result from our capacity to direct a saccade toward that object. There is no need to build a detailed mental representation of the visual environment, because the visual world is already outside there, each detail being immediately available for visual exploration [170]. We believe that consideration of neglect behavior, through the studies discussed in the present review, lends substantial support to these notions [171].…”

Volatile visual representations: Failing to detect changes in recently processed information

“…This intuitive approach suggests that mental representations contain a cumulative record (CR) of many of the aspects of a scene that have been attended to. 1 The CR hypothesis is so intuitively appealing that, as O'Regan (O'Regan, 1992;O'Regan & Noë, 2001) has pointed out, it is an implicit assumption of many experiments on visual perception. However, as O'Regan noted, this hypothesis enjoys little empirical support.…”