The last fifteen years of vision research have produced several challenges to both our intuitive conception of the nature of vision and to orthodox frameworks for studying vision.  Empirical results demonstrating blindness by subjects to sudden changes in a visual scene (change blindness) and blindness to unattended changes in the visual scene (inattentional blindness) undermine the idea that the phenomenology of visual experience at any given moment is as richly detailed and timely as we routinely suppose.  Dissociations between the ability to discriminate and identify object shape on the basis of visual experience and visuomotor task performance exhibited by optic ataxics (object discrimination with impaired visuomotor skills) and visual form agnosics (visuomotor skills without object discrimination) have undermined the orthodox view that conscious visual experience closely guides motor behavior.

Against the backdrop of these and other striking empirical findings, some researchers criticize the use of non-natural tasks and images in experimental settings, while others raise questions about how one ought understand the relationship between the qualities encountered in visual experiences and the distal structures typically causing those experiences. Some even voice doubts about the traditional boundaries between the mind and our perceptual systems, on the one hand, and the world, on the other.

These challenges to contemporary orthodoxy have roots in previous debates, of course, though vision research’s historically diverse nature sometimes obscures the historical predecessors of current debates. Furthermore, the current climate of specialization throughout the sciences can make it difficult for researchers focusing on one set of problems to benefit from the work of others on related problems. This conference aims to bring together a diverse set of vision researchers – from both the sciences and philosophy – at every career stage in order to facilitate a productive and much-needed exchange of ideas that will further inquiry into what, how, and why we see.