How does an animal conceal itself from visual detection by other animals? This review paper seeks to identify general principles that may apply in this broad area. It considers mechanisms of visual encoding, of grouping and object encoding, and of search. In most cases, the evidence base comes from studies of humans or species whose vision approximates to that of humans. The effort is hampered ...

Primates use frequent, rapid eye movements to sample their visual environment. This is a fruitful strategy to make the best use of the highly sensitive foveal part of the retina, but it requires neural mechanisms to bind the rapidly changing visual input into a single, stable percept. Studies investigating these neural mechanisms have typically assumed that perisaccadic perception in nonhuman p...

A visual scene is commonly defined as a view of an environment comprised of objects and surfaces organized in a meaningful way, like a kitchen, a street or a forest path. More broadly, the domain of scene perception encompasses any visual stimulus that contains multiple elements arranged in a spatial layout, for example a shelf of books, an office desk, or leaves on the ground. As a rough disti...

What is visual texture, and how might a study of the visual perception of texture help us to better understand human vision? In this chapter we will attempt to give the reader a feel for how the study of texture perception is useful both in understanding the impact of texture itself, as well as in providing a better understanding of basic visual mechanisms that respond not only to texture but t...

Markings, such as designs, writings, diagrams, and depictions, are expressive and communicative human artifacts. The conventional assumption that findings from the study of the visual perception of markings-in particular, of pictures-can be generalized to real-world perception is examined and found to be false. The processes involved in the visual perception of the world and in the visual perce...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study is to ascertain whether there are differences among groups of children based on their social perception skills in visual perception and fluid reasoning to assist in more effective intervention planning. METHOD A total of 80 children were grouped on the basis of their performance on a social perception measure (Child and Adolescent Social Perception) and the...

The effects of novelty on low-level visual perception were investigated in two experiments using a two-alternative forced-choice tilt detection task. A target, consisting of a Gabor patch, was preceded by a cue that was either a novel or a familiar fractal image. Participants had to indicate whether the Gabor stimulus was vertically oriented or slightly tilted. In the first experiment tilt angl...

BACKGROUND Visual perception is not a passive process: in order to efficiently process visual input, the brain actively uses previous knowledge (e.g., memory) and expectations about what the world should look like. However, perception is not only influenced by previous knowledge. Especially the perception of emotional stimuli is influenced by the emotional state of the observer. In other words,...

THEORIES OF PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT 110 The Constructivist View 110 The Ecological View 112 The Contemporary Situation in Perceptual Theory 113 BASIC VISUAL SENSITIVITIES IN INFANCY 114 Visual Acuity 114 Contrast Sensitivity 116 Orientation Sensitivity 119 Pattern Discrimination 119 Color Vision 120 Motion Perception 124 SPACE PERCEPTION 126 Kinematic Information 127 Stereoscopic Depth Perceptio...