Surveying the seen: 100 years of British vision

Abstract

Perceptual phenomena and their interpretations have fashioned the course of psychology. This article surveys how theories of visual perception and methodologies have developed during the lifetime of the British Psychological Society. The experimental study of vision was instigated by British natural philosophers in the early nineteenth century but this impetus was not maintained thereafter. Not until the 1930s and 1940s did research on perception resume in earnest within British universities. The adoption of concepts (such as schema) potentially grounded in neural organization, particularly by Bartlett and Craik, accelerated experimental, theoretical and applied vision research. From mid-century the influence of information processing models of perception became increasingly dominant, and they were often integrated with the rapidly expanding understanding of neurophysiological underpinnings. The epitome of these developments was Marr's model of vision which, in our view, marked the start of the modern era of vision research. Computers have transformed the nature of stimulus control and response measurement in perceptual experiments. More naturalistic stimuli can be presented and manipulated, and complex behavioural responses, such as patterns of eye movements, fractionated. Non-invasive recording of brain activity to visual stimulation has similarly been transformed with a variety of methods for imaging brain activity. Neuroimaging has been applied to localizing perceptual and cognitive functions and in studying patients with known deficits in visual recognition. However, the eagerness with which the computer has been adopted by perceptual psychologists is likely to be tempered by a growing awareness of the differences between viewing scenes and simulations of them.

Bayesian Models of Attention

“…Some of the neural hypotheses proposed here, such as those related to ACh, NE, and cortical neural populations, still need to be experimentally explored and verified. Finally, there are many other aspects of attention that have not yet received a Bayesian treatment, such as the large body of experimental results related to feature integration (A. G. Treisman & Gelade, 19890) and the binding problem (Zeki, 1978;Maunsell & Newsome, 1987;Wade & Bruce, 2001).…”

Attention in a Bayesian Framework

“…The origins of the binding problem lie in neurophysiological evidence for cortical specialization – different features are processed in different regions of the brain (Zeki, 1976 , 1978 ; Maunsell and Newsome, 1987 ; Wade and Bruce, 2001 ) – and for the hierarchical broadening of receptive fields which may degrade information about feature-location. This combination of anatomical separation and spatial imprecision is thought to complicate the association of features which belong to the same objects.…”