Cognitive Neuroscience: The Eye, the Brain, Vision and Thought
Jim Pomerantz, Professor of Psychology
An overview of current understanding of our perceptual and cognitive functioning, including recent discoveries about the eye and brain. 
Rice University Alumni College
March 13, 2004, Shell Auditorium, Jones School 

James R. Pomerantz (pomeran@rice.edu), 713-348-3419, Sewall Hall 492A

Website for this lecture:
www.ruf.rice.edu/~pomeran/CogNeuroAlumniCollege2004.htm

Images for this lecture:
www.ruf.rice.edu/~pomeran/AlumniCollege2004Imagelist.htm

Ten Introductory Questions

1.     Why is it that a pencil appears to bend when it is stuck into a glass of water?
2.     Why does the world look right side up when the lens of the eye makes the retinal image upside down?
3.     Why does the moon look bigger when it is low in the sky, near the horizon, than when it is high in the sky, near the zenith?
4.     How is it that we can tell that two lines do not line up (i.e., are not collinear) when they are ‘off’ collinearity by a distance that is less than half the diameter of a rod or cone?
5.     Why does the apparent pitch of a siren change as an ambulance or fire engine passes you?
6.     Why are so few textbooks or newspapers printed with yellow ink on white paper?
7.     Given that our senses sometimes play tricks on us, how can we be sure that the ‘real world’ out there really exists?
8.     How could you tell whether dogs can see colors?  Whether human infants can see colors?
9.     Why do the stripes on a barber pole appear to move up when we know intellectually that the pole is just spinning horizontally?  More generally, when does our intellectual knowledge of the world affect what we perceive?
10. What would it take to construct a robot that could recognize dogs and tell them from cats, etc.?  (Cf. bar code scanners).

Eight facts about perception.  Perception:  

1. Is limited:

2. Is selective

3. Requires memory

4. Is not entirely veridical (trustworthy): Hermann Grid, Spiral Illusion, Simultaneous Contrast

5. Takes time: Metacontrast, Slow Metacontrast

6. Corresponds more to the distal than to the proximal stimulus: Shepard Boxtops, Adelson Shadow Effect, Lightness Constancy

7. Involves the active organization of sensory information: Hexagram of Spot Circles, R. C. James Photograph, Necker Cube, Subjective Necker Cube   (Bradley, Dumais, and Petry, 1976)

8. Focuses on change, not on steady-state information.

Illusions in the 'real world': eight moon illusions

1. Size at horizon

2. Moon through moving clouds

3. Moon through side car window

4. Moon completion

5. Man in the moon

6. Craters  depth illusion

7. Disk (vs. globe) illusion

8. Self-luminous, glowing (vs. reflective)

Good, recent books on vision:

Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, by Margaret Livingstone.  Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 2002.
Visual Science: From Photons to Phenomenology, by Stephen E. Palmer.  MIT Press, 1999.
Eye & Brain, by Richard L. Gregory.  Princeton University Press, 1997.
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision, by Martha Farah.  Blackwell, 2000.
Sensation & Perception (5th edition), by E. Bruce Goldstein. Brooks/Cole, 1999
Visual Perception: Essential Readings, Steven Yantis, Editor. Psychology Press, 2000.

Reference on McCollough effect (red and green vertical and horizontal stripes) which I probably will not be able to demonstrate for you:
McCollough, Celeste (1965). Color adaptation of edge-detectors in the human visual system. Science, 149, 9 1115­1116.