Visual Reflections: A Perceptual Deficit and Its Implications

ISBN-13: 9780195168693 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 320 str.

Michael McCloskey;McCloskey

Opis

How much can we learn about normal visual perception and cognition from a malfunctioning visual system? Quite a lot, as Michael McCloskey makes abundantly clear in this book. McCloskey presents his work with AH, a college student who has an extraordinary deficit in visual perception. When AH looks at an object, she sees it clearly and identifies it readily; yet she is often dramatically mistaken about where the object is or how it is oriented. For example, she may reach out to grasp an object that she sees on her left, but miss it completely because it is actually on her right; or she may see an arrow pointing up when it is really pointing down. AH's errors, together with many other clues, lead McCloskey to some very interesting conclusions about how we perceive the world. He develops theoretical claims about visual subsystems, the nature of visual location and orientation representations, attention and spatial representations, the role of the visual system in mental imagery, and the levels of the visual system implicated in awareness. Visual Reflections makes a fascinating and compelling case that we can often learn more about a process when it goes awry than when it functions flawlessly.

Recenzje

This book gives a fascinating and detailed insight into the visual world of a unique and extraordinary individual. McCloskey has assembled a plethora of careful observations showing that this apparently unexceptional person, A.H., habitually sees the world in a mirror-reversed fashion, though surprisingly without this greatly affecting her everyday life. The book challenges current accounts of visuospatial cognition and its development, as well as some current philosophical accounts of perception.

O autorze

Michael McCloskey is Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on mental representation and computation in visual-spatial cognition and lexical processing. He studies cognitive deficits in children and adults with brain damage or learning disabilities, with the aim of gaining insight into normal cognitive representations and processes, and how they are disrupted when the brain is damaged or fails to develop normally. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Princeton University.