Follow up on Gibson and visual perception. Vision is such a critical misunderstood aspect of our use. We discussed the senses here not long ago, and how they operate by identifying differences or changes, not absolutes. And yet the standard theory of vision is all about absolutes (Gibsons version below corrects this and returns sight to being about perceiving change and differences). Before I was describing here how Gibson flatly rejected the dominant theories of 3D or stereo vision. Its quite peculiar that theyve survived as long as they have, even into the present day, because once you tease them apart, theyre complete nonsense. As Gibson did brilliantly - his main book is one of the great scientific works of the 20th, or any, century. To use some of his own words (pp. 213-214): Retinal image optics assumes that if one object in space has an image in each of the two eyes the two images have to be fused into one picture in the brain. It further assumes that convergence or divergence of the eyes somehow works in the interest of this fusion process. If the physiological images were not combined or unified, we should see two objects instead of one. Ecological optics makes no such assumptions, rejecting the very idea of a physiological image transmitted to the brain. It supposes that two eyes have no more difficulty in perceiving one object than two hands do in feeling one object, or than two ears do in perceiving one event. The dual ocular system registers both the matching of structure between the optic arrays at the different points of observation of the two eyes and the perspective mismatch of their structure, both the congruence and the disparity, at the same time. The two eyes are not two channels of sensation but a single system... The fallacy of the traditional theory comes from supposing that two physiological images have to be fused in the brain, as if one picture were picked up and superposed on the other and then compared, in the manner of a photographer who puts one transparent film on top of another and looks to see if they match.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 03:14:50 +0000
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