Abstract
Reviewed by: Fatima M. Felisberti, Kingston University London, UK
It is a formidable challenge for any author to make a complex topic like perception accessible and thought-provoking to the general public in equal measure. This concise book manages to do that, covering topics ranging from lightness and colour to motion and action. In fact, I wonder whether Visual Perception would have been a more appropriate title for it, even though some observations go far beyond the confines of vision, acting as a framework to understand other modes of perception.
Reviewing this book brought back fond memories of my time as a postdoctoral researcher in vision neuroscience and psychophysics. Rogers draws on his extensive knowledge of visual perception and has published widely in the area (e.g. Howard & Rogers, 2012). He is also an accomplished communicator and his writing is fluid, flowing smoothly from one core concept to another, helping uninitiated readers to grasp some of perception’s underlying complexities and, in some cases, counter-intuitive findings.
A central question seems to underlie this book: Do we only perceive what our minds and senses are prepared to understand? Indeed, some of the chapters in this short tour through visual perception start with brief philosophical considerations related to the nature and purpose of the topic addressed. Those are some of the best parts of the book, given the relevance of perception for the understanding of contextualized visual behaviour, as illustrated by an old joke:
Patient: I keep getting a stabbing pain in my eye every time I drink coffee.
Doctor: Have you tried taking the spoon out of the cup?
It might be puzzling for a novice reader why Rogers accommodates the different theoretical approaches sprinkled across those chapters: Sometimes, he refers to perception as indirect (in a manner reminiscent of Gregory’s hypotheses testing of sensorimotor activations); sometimes as direct, adopting a more Gibsonian line; and at other times, Rogers adopts a computational approach. Yet, I found such an approach refreshing since it nicely demonstrates that we still do not have a unified theory of visual perception.
Chapter 3 (‘The perception of lightness and colour’) may be the most challenging for the general public, probably because some of the stimuli used in experimental studies are difficult to imagine in one’s ‘mind eye’, especially colour-coded stimuli. Having said this, the figure using lightness records of the same coloured scene was an imaginative way to illustrate the two topics.
Chapter 4 (‘Motion perception’) offers a balanced and clear overview of the topic. Chapter 5 (‘Perception of a 3-D world’), with its reference to ecological vision, is especially relevant given the interest in the topic created by the increasing use of virtual and augmented reality across different types of media gadgets. Chapter 6 (‘Perception and action’) introduces the reader to the inextricable link between perception and action. After all, perception relies on an active exploration of the visual environment, which involves an implicit understanding of the impending effects of one’s actions on that environment. Here, Rogers adopts the Gibsonian view that perception is direct, but without negating the role of sensorimotor knowledge (or processing) in the mediation of perception. Chapter 7 (‘Delusions about illusions’) tells about the relevance (or lack) of using illusions to study visual perception.
Chapters 5 to 7 may be of more interest to the general public than earlier chapters and draw on a wide range of findings, even when not exploring them in greater detail due to the space constraints of the book.
One aspect that puzzled me in this book was why the issues discussed in Chapter 8 (‘What can physiology tell us about perceptual processes?’) were separated from the other chapters? What does a discussion of how to differentiate psychological and physiological evidence really contribute to the understanding of the topic? I feel that such an attempt is as problematic as, for example, the distinction between low- and high-level vision. Although Chapter 8 refers to some beautiful early physiological studies on vision, the information provided feels disconnected from the rest of the book. More importantly, most of that information is widely and freely available on reliable Internet sites (cf. book ‘Webvision’ at http://www.visionscience.com/). In this context, the chapter could have expanded on the cited links between motion, action and spatial navigation with the brain’s magnocellular and parvocellular streams and V5/MT areas. Otherwise, I would have preferred to read about topics such as the binding problem (i.e., integration of colour and shape features into reliable and retrievable mental representations; cf. Wood, 2014) or object recognition than about interesting but scattered physiological nuggets.
A minor rearrangement of the order in which the chapters are presented could make the book more exciting to readers not familiar with visual perception. For example, Chapter 6 could follow straight after the introduction to perception. Even novice readers would be able to understand it well (it does not require any specialist knowledge, at least at first sight) and, in comparison to the present version’s Chapter 2, would more easily compel the reader to continue learning about visual perception. Chapter 6 could be followed by the excellent Chapter 4, with the remaining chapters following in the same order as before.
Another minor point: There are two repeated figures in the book (though not exact copies): the Ames room and the hollow face mask of Beethoven.
Overall, however, the novice and curious reader is likely to enjoy this book: The pocket size and stylish format in tandem with a relatively affordable price makes its printed version suitable for those with limited time or those who simply want a quick overview about the way we see and interact with the world. Psychology and computer science students, in particular, may find this book useful either as an introduction to visual perception or as a tool to revise some of its key concepts.