Customer Reviews

Why We See What We Do: An Empirical Theory of Vision

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book's thesis is as follows: "The problem [of vision] is solved by having retinal stimuli trigger reflex responses... that have been determined purely by behavioral consequences of interactions with the environment over time. As a result, what observers actually experience in response to any visual stimulus is its accumulated statistical meaning... In short, the observer sees the probability distribution of the possible sources of the visual stimulus." There are two reviews of this book that are highly critical of its thesis. They are well worth reading. One is by Alan Gilchrist (Nature Neuroscience, 2003), and the other is by David Burr (J. Cognitive Neuroscience, 2005). I find myself agreeing with many of their criticisms of the central thesis, but...

I gave the book 5 stars anyway. (1) Each chapter's discussion of the basic problems of vision is clear and concise. (2) The artwork, and what it demonstrates, is well worth the price of admission. For instance, the illustrations of color perception and reflective surfaces are beautiful and powerful. The illustrations are simply phenomenal. (3) Perhaps the authors are re-inventing the wheel or kicking dead horses, but I'm just not so sure... The authors have forced me to re-think some ideas about vision that I've held for a long time. And I think they do a nice job of taking some truly old and cartoonish ideas about vision and relegating them to the dust heap. Even if their "empirical" theory of vision seems flawed or incomplete, there's much about it that I find myself wanting to re-visit and mull over. And if I'm not mistaken, various recent findings regarding the statistics of natural images are, independently, providing considerable evidence for the authors' thesis.

This book describes a fundamental shift in understanding how the visual system makes sense of what is seen. It is a must read for those interested in perception and in information processing by the brain. There has been much recent research supporting its hypotheses. The book signals a shift away from a mechanistic machine-like image reconstruction by the brain to a more intuitive and empirical model based on what we actually see.