[PDF] Vision How Why And What We See eBook

Author : Nigel Daw
Publisher : OUP USA
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 46,29 MB
Release : 2012-01-19
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0199751617

GET BOOK

This book covers all aspects of the visual system from sensory aspects to eye movements, attention, and visual memory in a brief format. Each chapter describes the psychology, followed by where in the brain that aspect is dealt with, the properties of the cells in that area, and what happens if a patient has a lesion or stroke in that area.

Author : A. Joan Saab
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 167 pages
File Size : 47,22 MB
Release : 2021-02-26
Category : History
ISBN : 0271088702

GET BOOK

Advances in technology allow us to see the invisible: fetal heartbeats, seismic activity, cell mutations, virtual space. Yet in an age when experience is so intensely mediated by visual records, the centuries-old realization that knowledge gained through sight is inherently fallible takes on troubling new dimensions. This book considers the ways in which seeing, over time, has become the foundation for knowing (or at least for what we think we know). A. Joan Saab examines the scientific and socially constructed aspects of seeing in order to delineate a genealogy of visuality from the Renaissance to the present, demonstrating that what we see and how we see it are often historically situated and culturally constructed. Through a series of linked case studies that highlight moments of seeming disconnect between seeing and believing—hoaxes, miracles, spirit paintings, manipulated photographs, and holograms, to name just a few—she interrogates the relationship between “visions” and visuality. This focus on the strange and the wonderful in understanding changing notions of visions and visual culture is a compelling entry point into the increasingly urgent topic of technologically enhanced representations of reality. Accessibly written and thoroughly enlightening, Objects of Vision is a concise history of the connections between seeing and knowing that will appeal to students and teachers of visual studies and sensory, social, and cultural history.

Author : Kestutis Kveraga
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 50,67 MB
Release : 2014-10-31
Category : Science
ISBN : 0262027852

GET BOOK

Cutting-edge research on the visual cognition of scenes, covering issues that include spatial vision, context, emotion, attention, memory, and neural mechanisms underlying scene representation. For many years, researchers have studied visual recognition with objects—single, clean, clear, and isolated objects, presented to subjects at the center of the screen. In our real environment, however, objects do not appear so neatly. Our visual world is a stimulating scenery mess; fragments, colors, occlusions, motions, eye movements, context, and distraction all affect perception. In this volume, pioneering researchers address the visual cognition of scenes from neuroimaging, psychology, modeling, electrophysiology, and computer vision perspectives. Building on past research—and accepting the challenge of applying what we have learned from the study of object recognition to the visual cognition of scenes—these leading scholars consider issues of spatial vision, context, rapid perception, emotion, attention, memory, and the neural mechanisms underlying scene representation. Taken together, their contributions offer a snapshot of our current knowledge of how we understand scenes and the visual world around us. Contributors Elissa M. Aminoff, Moshe Bar, Margaret Bradley, Daniel I. Brooks, Marvin M. Chun, Ritendra Datta, Russell A. Epstein, Michèle Fabre-Thorpe, Elena Fedorovskaya, Jack L. Gallant, Helene Intraub, Dhiraj Joshi, Kestutis Kveraga, Peter J. Lang, Jia Li Xin Lu, Jiebo Luo, Quang-Tuan Luong, George L. Malcolm, Shahin Nasr, Soojin Park, Mary C. Potter, Reza Rajimehr, Dean Sabatinelli, Philippe G. Schyns, David L. Sheinberg, Heida Maria Sigurdardottir, Dustin Stansbury, Simon Thorpe, Roger Tootell, James Z. Wang

Author : Richard Masland
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 39,85 MB
Release : 2021-01-07
Category : Science
ISBN : 1786078171

GET BOOK

Spotting a face in a crowd is so easy, you take it for granted. But how you do it is one of science's great mysteries. Vision is involved in nearly a third of everything a brain does and explaining how it works reveals more than just how we see. It also tells us how the brain processes information – how it perceives, learns and remembers. In We Know It When We See It, pioneering neuroscientist Richard Masland covers everything from what happens when light hits your retina, to the increasingly sophisticated nerve nets that turn that light into knowledge, to what a computer algorithm must be able to do before it can truly be called ‘intelligent’. It is a profound yet accessible investigation into how our bodies make sense of the world.

Author : Mark Changizi
Publisher : BenBella Books, Inc.
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 19,4 MB
Release : 2010-06-08
Category : Science
ISBN : 193525121X

GET BOOK

In The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision, Mark Changizi, prominent neuroscientist and vision expert, addresses four areas of human vision and provides explanations for why we have those particular abilities, complete with a number of full-color illustrations to demonstrate his conclusions and to engage the reader. Written for both the casual reader and the science buff hungry for new information, The Vision Revolution is a resource that dispels commonly believed perceptions about sight and offers answers drawn from the field's most recent research. Changizi focuses on four “why" questions: 1. Why do we see in color? 2. Why do our eyes face forward? 3. Why do we see illusions? 4. Why does reading come so naturally to us? Why Do We See in Color? It was commonly believed that color vision evolved to help our primitive ancestors identify ripe fruit. Changizi says we should look closer to home: ourselves. Human color vision evolved to give us greater insights into the mental states and health of other people. People who can see color changes in skin have an advantage over their color-blind counterparts; they can see when people are blushing with embarrassment, purple-faced with exertion or the reddening of rashes. Changizi's research reveals that the cones in our eyes that allow us to see color are exquisitely designed exactly for seeing color changes in the skin. And it's no coincidence that the primates with color vision are the ones with bare spots on their faces and other body parts; Changizi shows that the development of color vision in higher primates closely parallels the loss of facial hair, culminating in the near hairlessness and highly developed color vision of humans. Why Do Our Eyes Face Forward? Forward-facing eyes set us apart from most mammals, and there is much dispute as to why we have them. While some speculate that we evolved this feature to give us depth perception available through stereo vision, this type of vision only allows us to see short distances, and we already have other mechanisms that help us to estimate distance. Changizi's research shows that with two forward-facing eyes, primates and humans have an x-ray ability. Specifically, we're able to see through the cluttered leaves of the forest environment in which we evolved. This feature helps primates see their targets in a crowded, encroached environment. To see how this works, hold a finger in front of your eyes. You'll find that you're able to look “through" it, at what is beyond your finger. One of the most amazing feats of two forward-facing eyes? Our views aren't blocked by our noses, beaks, etc. Why Do We See Illusions? We evolved to see moving objects, not where they are, but where they are going to be. Without this ability, we couldn't catch a ball because the brain's ability to process visual information isn't fast enough to allow us to put our hands in the right place to intersect for a rapidly approaching baseball. “If our brains simply created a perception of the way the world was at the time light hit the eye, then by the time that perception was elicited—which takes about a tenth of a second for the brain to do—time would have marched on, and the perception would be of the recent past," Changizi explains. Simply put, illusions occur when our brain is tricked into thinking that a stationary two-dimensional picture has an element that is moving. Our brains project the “moving" element into the future and, as a result, we don't see what's on the page, but what our brain thinks will be the case a fraction of a second into the future. Why Does Reading Come So Naturally to Us? We can read faster than we can hear, which is odd, considering that reading is relatively recent,

Author : Shelley Pearsall
Publisher : Yearling
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 30,59 MB
Release : 2016-10-04
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 0553497316

GET BOOK

This “luminescent” (Kirkus Reviews) story of anger and art, loss and redemption will appeal to fans of Lisa Graff’s Lost in the Sun and Vince Vawter’s Paperboy. NOMINATED FOR 16 STATE AWARDS! AN ALA NOTABLE BOOK AN ILA TEACHERS CHOICE A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Arthur T. Owens grabbed a brick and hurled it at the trash picker. Arthur had his reasons, and the brick hit the Junk Man in the arm, not the head. But none of that matters to the judge—he is ready to send Arthur to juvie forever. Amazingly, it’s the Junk Man himself who offers an alternative: 120 hours of community service . . . working for him. Arthur is given a rickety shopping cart and a list of the Seven Most Important Things: glass bottles, foil, cardboard, pieces of wood, lightbulbs, coffee cans, and mirrors. He can’t believe it—is he really supposed to rummage through people’s trash? But it isn’t long before Arthur realizes there’s more to the Junk Man than meets the eye, and the “trash” he’s collecting is being transformed into something more precious than anyone could imagine. . . . Inspired by the work of folk artist James Hampton, Shelley Pearsall has crafted an affecting and redemptive novel about discovering what shines within us all, even when life seems full of darkness. “A moving exploration of how there is often so much more than meets the eye.” —Booklist, starred review “There are so many things to love about this book. Remarkable.” —The Christian Science Monitor

Author : Nicholas J. Wade
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 492 pages
File Size : 50,44 MB
Release : 2000-01-31
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9780262731294

GET BOOK

This illustrated survey covers what Nicholas Wade calls the "observational era of vision," beginning with the Greek philosophers and ending with Wheatstone's description of the stereoscope in the late 1830s.

Author : Michael Land
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 26,61 MB
Release : 2018-11-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 0191064866

GET BOOK

Vision is the sense by which we and other animals obtain most of our information about the world around us. Darwin appreciated that at first sight it seems absurd that the human eye could have evolved by natural selection. But we now know far more about vision, the many times it has independently evolved in nature, and the astonishing variety of ways to see. The human eye, with a lens forming an image on a sensitive retina, represents just one. Scallops, shrimps, and lobsters all use mirrors in different ways. Jumping spiders scan with their front-facing eyes to check whether the object in front is an insect to eat, another spider to mate with, or a predator to avoid. Mantis shrimps can even measure the polarization of light. Animal eyes are amazing structures, often involving precision optics and impressive information processing, mainly using wet protein - not the substance an engineer would choose for such tasks. In Eyes to See, Michael Land, one of the leading world experts on vision, explores the varied ways in which sight has evolved and is used in the natural world, and describes some of the ingenious experiments researchers have used to uncover its secrets. He also discusses human vision, including his experiments on how our eye movements help us to do everyday tasks, as well as skilled ones such as sight-reading music or driving. He ends by considering the fascinating problem of how the constantly shifting images from our eyes are converted in the brain into the steady and integrated conscious view of the world we experience.

Author : Margaret S. Livingstone
Publisher : Harry N. Abrams
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 46,63 MB
Release : 2014-03-25
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781419706929

GET BOOK

A Harvard neurobiologist explains how vision works, citing the scientific origins of artistic genius and providing coverage of such topics as optical illusions and the correlation between learning disabilities and artistic skill.