Welcome

1/28/2004 slide 2

Roadmap

•Mystery of vision and historical theories

•Ecological basis

•High-level perception concepts

–Figure-Ground

–Size constancy

–Depth and object solidity

•Lower-level: rules for image “construction”

–Visual Intelligence [Hoffman 1998] book has 35 rules that the perceptual system uses to decode visual stimulus and create a useful description of the world

–These underly the higher-level perceptual effects

•Perception research in the Visual Methodologies [Rose 2001] framework

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	SO, last week we looked at cultural theory and linguistically approaches to decoding images. These theories (semiotics, discourse theory, general cultural theory) are valuable tools for understanding the role of images in our culture, how we may be influenced by them, and how to better bring to SEE them and understand them.

	As we noted with the “gorilla” exercises, we are not always aware of what we are seeing and usually don’t consciously analyze it.

	This week we will learn something about how our brains perform the feat of seeing and where in this process image interpretations of different types occur. ON the one hand, we’ll see that , in a way, it’s ALL interpretation, and that, as the author of VI claims, we actively construct our visual world. On the other hand, we’ll see that this does not mean that reality is subjective or possibly non-existent.

	We’ll start with some past and present theories of vision, proceed to some topics you’ve probably heard of, if not studied, such as figure-groudn distinctions, and then dip into the lower-level “rules” described in the VI book.

	Finally, we’ll assess this way of looking at images in terms of the Framework proposed by Gillian in the VMs book.