Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) [Hardcover]

Zenon W. Pylyshyn (Author)

Book Description

Series: Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology | Publication Date: December 5, 2003

In Seeing and Visualizing, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that seeing is different from thinking and that to see is not, as it may seem intuitively, to create an inner replica of the world. Pylyshyn examines how we see and how we visualize and why the scientific account does not align with the way these processes seem to us "from the inside." In doing so, he addresses issues in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience.First, Pylyshyn argues that there is a core stage of vision independent from the influence of our prior beliefs and examines how vision can be intelligent and yet essentially knowledge-free. He then proposes that a mechanism within the vision module, called a visual index (or FINST), provides a direct preconceptual connection between parts of visual representations and things in the world, and he presents various experiments that illustrate the operation of this mechanism. He argues that such a deictic reference mechanism is needed to account for many properties of vision, including how mental images attain their apparent spatial character without themselves being laid out in space in our brains.The final section of the book examines the "picture theory" of mental imagery, including recent neuroscience evidence, and asks whether any current evidence speaks to the issue of the format of mental images. This analysis of mental imagery brings together many of the themes raised throughout the book and provides a framework for considering such issues as the distinction between the form and the content of representations, the role of vision in thought, and the relation between behavioral, neuroscientific, and phenomenological evidence regarding mental representations.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Over the past thirty years, Zenon Pylyshyn has played a leading role in developing theories of high-level visual cognition. In this book, he brings together his long-standing interests in the modularity of visual processing, the relations between visual attention, spatial indexing, and 'seeing', and the relationship between imagery and vision. The work not only summarizes his influential views, but also raises important questions for future research. It will be of considerable relevance to all interested in high-level vision, from psychologists to computer scientists and philosophers."--Glyn Humphreys, University of Birmingham

" Seeing and Visualizing offers a persuasive account of why visual perception and visual imagery do not depend on internal pictorial representations, and puts forward the deeply counterintuitive notion that the machinery of visual thinking does not use mental pictures at all. Pylyshyn"s masterful defense of this idea is a "must-read" not only for committed Fodorians but also for those who believe that mental representations resemble the things they depict. The book is challenging and provocative—and even occasionally infuriating—but always thoughtful and immensely readable. I recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered about how we see and visualize the world." Mel Goodale, Canada Research Professor in Visual Neuroscience, University of Western Ontario

"Pylyshyn's book is to be commended as a thorough and persuasive defense of the information-processing approach to vision and visualizing. It should be essential reading for psychologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers." Paul Coates Metapsychology

"*Seeing and Visualizing* offers a persuasive account of why visual perception and visual imagery do not depend on internal pictorial representations, and puts forward the deeply counterintuitive notion that the machinery of visual thinking does not use mental pictures at all. Pylyshyn's masterful defense of this idea is a 'must-read' not only for committed Fodorians but also for those who believe that mental representations resemble the things they depict. The book is challenging and provocative -- and even occasionally infuriating -- but always thoughtful and immensely readable. I recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered about how we see and visualize the world."--Mel Goodale, Canada Research Professor in Visual Neuroscience, University of Western Ontario

About the Author

Zenon W. Pylyshyn is Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science at Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. He is the author of Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not what You Think (2003) and Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (1984), both published by The MIT Press, as well as over a hundred scientific papers on perception, attention, and the computational theory of mind.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: A Bradford Book (December 5, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262162172
• ISBN-13: 978-0262162173
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #543,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

(From http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/pylyshyn.html)

Zenon Pylyshyn received a B.Eng. in Engineering-Physics from McGill University, an M.Sc. in Control Systems from the University of Saskatchewan, and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Saskatchewan for research involving the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory. Following his Ph.D. he spent two years as a Canada Council Senior fellow and then joined the faculty at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he remained until 1994 as Professor of Psychology and of Computer Science, as well as honorary professor in the departments of Philosophy and Electrical Engineering and Director of the UWO Center for Cognitive Science. In 1994 Pylyshyn joined the faculty of Rutgers University as Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science.

Pylyshyn is recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. He was awarded the Donald O. Hebb Award from the Canadian Psychological Association in June 1990, "for distinguished contributions to psychology as a science". He is a fellow if the Canadian Psychological Association and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has been a Killam Fellow, a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a fellow at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science and a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR). In 1998 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2004 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in Paris and delivered the Jean Nicod lectures. He is past president of two international societies: the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Cognitive Science Society. For 9 years (1985-1994) he was national director of the Program in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is on the editorial boards of eight scientific journals and has been on several industrial or academic scientific advisory boards.

Pylyshyn has published well over 100 scientific articles and book chapters, including a paper designated as a Science Citation Classic ("What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain", Psychological Bulletin, 1973) and has given over 200 talks and keynote addresses. He is author of Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World (Jean Nicod Lectures Series, MIT Press, 2007), Seeing and Visualizing: It's not what you think (MIT Press, 2004) [Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division Annual Awards competition], Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1984), as well as contributor/editor of five books, including: Perspectives on the Computer Revolution (1988); Computational Processes in Human Vision: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (1988), The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence (1987), Meaning and Cognitive Structure: Issues in the Computational Theory of Mind (1986), and The Robot's Dilemma Revisited (1996). As chairman of an NSF-sponsored panel on artificial intelligence, Pylyshyn also helped to produce a major survey of the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence which appeared as part of the book What Can be Automated? (1980).

For the past fifteen years, Pylyshyn's personal research has dealt with two general areas. One is the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive system that enables humans to perceive the world, as well as to reason and imagine. This has led to a number of theoretical investigations of the "architecture of the mind". On the experimental side Pylyshyn has been concerned with exploring his Visual Indexing Theory (sometimes called the FINST theory), dealing with how human visual attention is allocated and how humans cognize objects and space. This theory hypothesizes a preconceptual mechanism by which objects in a visual scene can be individuated, tracked, and directly (or demonstratively) referred to by cognitive processes prior to their properties being encoded. Over a dozen papers have been published on this theory and its experimental investigation, as well as its implications for understanding how vision is connected with the world, making perceptual-motor coordination possible. The theory has implications for philosophical issues concerning the semantics of visual perception as well as practical applications for the design of human-computer interfaces.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Pylyshyn criticizes standard assumptions about vision, January 20, 2011

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Cynthia S. Haggard "Cynthia Sally Haggard" (Washington DC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) (Paperback)

Seeing and Visualizing: It's not what you think, a new book by Zenon Pylyshyn due out in December , is a thorough review of what we know about vision with intriguing twists along the way. Pylyshyn articulates a point of view that he has developed, in a career spanning 40 years, about how people look at the world around them and think about what they see.

Pylyshyn's thesis - captured in the second part of his title - is that when it comes to vision, our ordinary everyday experiences "rest largely on a grand illusion" (x).
Pylyshyn's aim in this book is "to try to persuade you that when you look around, the impression you have that you are creating a large panoramic picture in your head is a total illusion" (xi). "But what is the problem?" you might say. "I'm sitting here at my desk, and I see my books, my papers, my computer screen and my coffee cup, I feel these objects when I reach out to touch them: What is illusory about that?" The problem is that scientific findings force us to accept that "there is more to vision than meets the eye" (5).

Pylyshyn unpacks the scientific evidence in Chapter 1, by asking us to consider what the brain has to work with. We have light-sensitive surfaces of the eye (the retinas), but they are two-dimensional, so our sense of depth must come from something else. We know that at least part of the information comes from the differences between the patterns that the two eyes receive, but how does this produce the experience of seeing a three-dimensional world?

The story gets even more puzzling as we look more closely at the information that the brain receives from the eyes. The retinas themselves are not uniform. Only a small central region (the fovea), about the size of the area covered by your thumb held at arm's length, has sufficient acuity to recognize printed characters at the normal reading distance. Outside of that region our ability to see clearly drops off rapidly, so that if we were trying to look from the corners of our eyes (rather than from the centrally located fovea) we would be considered legally blind. Color vision falls off rapidly too as we move away from the fovea, so we become color blind as well.

Then there is the problem of the blind spot (or blind spots, because we have one for each eye). Ten to thirteen degrees away from the fovea, retinal nerve fibers come together to form a cable to the brain. We should see two large oval-shaped discs that block our field of view, because this region has no receptors for vision. But we don't. We remain completely oblivious to the fact that we have these blind spots.

You might think this is bad enough, but it gets much worse. The eyes are in constant motion, jumping around in rapid leaps several times per second and generally spending only a fraction of a second gazing in any one direction. The retina, our primary contact with the visual world, is continually being smeared with moving information. And yet the world does not appear to move or flicker, and indeed, we are typically unaware that our eyes are jumping around.

So how do we see a rich and stable visual panorama in the face of such dynamic and impoverished information?

The standard answer is to say that while my eyes may have all these problems, I, the person doing the looking, don't suffer from these deficiencies. This is known as the "Cartesian Theater" reply, whereby the problem of seeing is "solved" by claiming that there must be an inner eye or inner screen onto which a complete view of the world is projected. Pylyshyn spends the rest of chapter 1 discussing the pros and cons of this view, and finally ends up rejecting it.

Pylyshyn is best known for his position in the mental imagery debate, which is a debate about whether mental images are real. Pylyshyn takes the view that they are not. To give you a flavor of this debate, just think of a rose for a moment. What color is it? Can you make it move by rotating it? Where is it? Is it in your mind? Your brain? Does it take up a certain amount of room inside your head? Is it real?

There have been some intriguing studies done by Roger Shepard on the nature of these mental images, which Pylyshyn discusses in chapter 6 of his book. In the most famous experiment, Shepard & Metzler (1971) showed subjects pairs of drawings of three-dimensional figures and asked them to judge whether the two objects depicted were identical except for orientation. Shepard & Metzler found that the time it took to make that judgment depended upon the orientation of the objects relative to one another, with more similar objects taking a shorter time to judge than less similar objects. That result, by itself, is no surprise. What really got people's attention, is that the time taken to make the judgment is a linear function of the angular displacement of the objects. In other words, the time taken to make the judgment and the orientation of the objects tracked perfectly.

These results have been interpreted to mean that mental images are rotated continuously and at a constant speed in the mind. But Pylyshyn argues that this interpretation is misleading because it implies that these images are real. His view is that the experience we have of these mental images is real, without the mental images themselves being real. To make this vivid, imagine you are listening to a story about unicorns or elves. Your experience of the story - boredom, enjoyment - is real enough, but the unicorns or elves are not real, in the sense of existing independently of our thoughts and imaginings. In a similar way, we can have the experience of "seeing" an image in "our mind's eye", or "speaking" in the "sentences" of our mother tongue when we think, without the images or sentences being real, or existing independently or our thoughts and imaginings.

For much of this book therefore, Pylyshyn criticizes standard assumptions that we have about vision, and introduces something new, often based upon his own work. One of his most original contributions is his theory about visual indexing, which he has been developing for the past 15 years. To understand this, ask yourself "When I look at an object, do I take in where it is?" For most of us, the answer is "Yes!" But Pylyshyn argues in Chapter 5 of his book that we don't. Instead our visual system just "points to" or "picks out" the object we are interested in, without encoding spatial location, using a mechanism called a "visual index". According to Pylyshyn, "indexing" or listing objects is enough to keep track of everything we see, without needing a coordinate system to specify each object's position in space. Most people will find this claim puzzling, so Pylyshyn does a very thorough job in Chapter 5 of describing the visual index mechanism and producing empirical support for his theory.

This new book will be an invaluable guide for professionals in the field due to its scope and thoroughness (it is about 500 pages long). It will also be of interest to others who simply find this topic fascinating, because Pylyshyn has a knack for taking disparate ideas and putting them together in unusual ways.