Changing
Views of Vision
Ronald A.
Rensink
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia
rensink@psych.ubc.ca
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This talk will survey some
of the developments in vision science that have changed our
understanding of human visual perception over the past several years.
For example, it was once believed that only simple operations could
take place at early visual levels. However, it now appears that
attention is not necessary for "visual intelligence"--a
large amount of sophisticated processing can be done without it.
Second, work on change blindness has shown that scene perception does
not involve a static, general-purpose description, but instead is
based on a dynamic representation that depends on a co-ordinated
interaction between attention, short-term, and long-term memory
systems. And third, vision itself no longer appears to be
limited to the production of a conscious "picture", but may
also be involved in other forms of cognition that can guide our
behavior.
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