When most people think of space, they think of physical space. However, visual space concerns space as consciously experienced, and it is studied through subjective measures, such as asking people to use numbers to estimate perceived distances, areas, angles, or volumes. This book explores the mismatch between perception and physical reality, and describes the many factors that influence the perception of space including the meaning assigned to geometric concepts like distance, the judgment methods used to report the experience, the presence or absence of cues to depth, and the orientation of a stimulus with respect to point of view. The main theme of the text is that no single geometry describes visual space, but that the geometry of visual space depends upon the stimulus conditions and mental shifts in the subjective meaning of size and distance. In addition, The Geometries of Visual Space: *contains philosophical, mathematical, and psychophysical background material; *looks at synthetic approaches to space perception including work on hyperbolic, spherical, and Euclidean geometries; *presents a meta-analysis of studies that ask observers to directly estimate size, distance, area, angle, and volume; *looks at the size constancy literature in which observers are asked to adjust a comparison stimulus to match a variety of standards at different distances away; *discusses research that takes a multi-dimensional approach toward studying visual space; and *discusses how spatial experience is influenced by memory. While this book is primarily intended for scholars in perception, mathematical psychology, and psychophysics, it will also be accessible to a wider audience since it is written at a readable level. It will make a good graduate-level textbook on space perception.

When most people think of space, they think of physical space. However, visual space concerns space as consciously experienced, and it is studied through subjective measures, such as asking people to use numbers to estimate perceived distances, areas, angles, or volumes. This book explores the mismatch between perception and physical reality, and describes the many factors that influence the perception of space including the meaning assigned to geometric concepts like distance, the judgment methods used to report the experience, the presence or absence of cues to depth, and the orientation of a stimulus with respect to point of view. The main theme of the text is that no single geometry describes visual space, but that the geometry of visual space depends upon the stimulus conditions and mental shifts in the subjective meaning of size and distance. In addition, The Geometries of Visual Space: *contains philosophical, mathematical, and psychophysical background material; *looks at synthetic approaches to space perception including work on hyperbolic, spherical, and Euclidean geometries; *presents a meta-analysis of studies that ask observers to directly estimate size, distance, area, angle, and volume; *looks at the size constancy literature in which observers are asked to adjust a comparison stimulus to match a variety of standards at different distances away; *discusses research that takes a multi-dimensional approach toward studying visual space; and *discusses how spatial experience is influenced by memory. While this book is primarily intended for scholars in perception, mathematical psychology, and psychophysics, it will also be accessible to a wider audience since it is written at a readable level. It will make a good graduate-level textbook on space perception.

A theory is presented of how global visual interactions between depth, length lightness, and form percepts can occur. The theory suggests how quantized activity patterns which reflect these visual properties can coherently fill-in, or complete, visually ambiguous regions starting with visually informative data features. Phenomena such as the Cornsweet and Craik-O'Brien effects, phantoms and subjective contours, binocular brightness summation, the equidistance tendency, Emmert's law, allelotropia, multiple spatial frequency scaling and edge detection, figure-ground completion, co-existence of depth and binocular rivalry, reflectance rivalry, Fechner's paradox, decrease of threshold contrast with increased number of cycles in a grating pattern, hysteresis, adaption level tuning, Weber law modulation, shift of sensitivity with background luminance, and the finite capacity of visual short term memory are discussed in terms of a small set of concepts and mechanisms. Limitations of alternative visual theories which depend on Fourier analysis, Laplacians, zero-crossings, and cooperative depth planes are described. Relationships between monocular and binocular processing of the same visual patterns are noted, and a shift in emphasis from edge and disparity computations towards the characterization of resonant activity-scaling correlations across multiple spatial scales is recommended. (Author).

The space we see around us is the end product of a long series of processes: physical, physiological, and cognitive. It is a highly structured perceptual entity. In contrast to the fact that most studies of visual perception are concerned with local phenomena in this visual space, the main purpose of this book is to discuss the global structure of visual space. The physical space which surrounds us is of Euclidean structure, but its perceived image is not necessarily structured in that way. Problems such as why the sky appears as a vault and why the horizon is located at eye level are discussed in the book.

The Adaptive Brain, II: Vision, Speech, Language, and Motor Control focuses on a unified theoretical analysis and predictions of important psychological and neurological data that illustrate the development of a true theory of mind and brain. The publication first elaborates on the quantized geometry of visual space and neural dynamics of form perception. Discussions focus on reflectance rivalry and spatial frequency detection, figure-ground separation by filling-in barriers, and disinhibitory propagation of functional scaling from boundaries to interiors. The text then takes a look at neural dynamics of perceptual grouping and brightness perception. Topics include simulation of a parametric binocular brightness study, smoothly varying luminance contours versus steps of luminance change, macrocircuit of processing stages, paradoxical percepts as probes of adaptive processes, and analysis of the Beck theory of textural segmentation. The book examines the neural dynamics of speech and language coding and word recognition and recall, including automatic activation and limited-capacity attention, a macrocircuit for the self-organization of recognition and recall, role of intra-list restructuring arid contextual associations, and temporal order information across item representations. The manuscript is a vital source of data for scientists and researchers interested in the development of a true theory of mind and brain.