Modern Discoveries in Neuroscience... And What They Reveal About You (Collection)

11. Perceiving geometry

In general, the complex discrepancies between the physical world and the perceptual spaces that define lightness, brightness, and color can be understood in terms of an empirical strategy that has evolved to circumvent the inverse problem. If this is the way vision operates, the same scheme should also explain perceptual phenomena pertinent to all the other visual qualities we see, preferably in quantitative terms. One of the most important of these additional qualities is the perception of geometry, the way we see spatial intervals, angles, shapes, and distances. Obviously, perceiving these fundamental aspects of physical geometry in a manner that enables appropriate behavior is critical. And here again biological vision ...