Seeing and Vizualizing

by Pylyshyn, Zenon W.

• ISBN13: 9780262661973
• ISBN10: 0262661977
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-01
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

Winner in the category of Psychology in the 2003 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. In Seeing and Visualizing, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that seeing is different from thinking and that to see is not, as it may seem intuitively, to create an inner replica of the world. Pylyshyn examines how we see and how we visualize and why the scientific account does not align with the way these processes seem to us "from the inside." In doing so, he addresses issues in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience. First, Pylyshyn argues that there is a core stage of vision independent from the influence of our prior beliefs and examines how vision can be intelligent and yet essentially knowledge-free. He then proposes that a mechanism within the vision module, called a visual index (or FINST), provides a direct preconceptual connection between parts of visual representations and things in the world, and he presents various experiments that illustrate the operation of this mechanism. He argues that such a deictic reference mechanism is needed to account for many properties of vision, including how mental images attain their apparent spatial character without themselves being laid out in space in our brains. The final section of the book examines the "picture theory" of mental imagery, including recent neuroscience evidence, and asks whether any current evidence speaks to the issue of the format of mental images. This analysis of mental imagery brings together many of the themes raised throughout the book and provides a framework for considering such issues as the distinction between the form and the content of representations, the role of vision in thought, and the relation between behavioral, neuroscientific, and phenomenological evidence regarding mental representations.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Acknowledgments	xvii
1 The Puzzle of Seeing	1	(48)
1.1 Why Do Things Look the Way They Do?	1	(1)
1.2 What Is Seeing?	2	(2)
1.3 Does Vision Create a "Picture" in the Head?	4	(12)
1.4 Problems with the Inner-Display Assumption: Part 1, What's in the Display?	16	(20)
1.5 More Problems with the Inner-Display Assumption: Part 2, Seeing or Figuring Out?	36	(10)
1.6 Where Do We Go from Here?	46	(3)
2 The Independence of Vision and Cognition	49	(44)
2.1 Is Vision Distinct from Reasoning?	49	(3)
2.2 The Case for the Continuity of Vision and Cognition	52	(12)
2.3 Some Reasons for Questioning the Continuity Thesis	64	(9)
2.4 Distinguishing Perceptual and Decision Stages: Some Methodological Issues	73	(3)
2.5 Some Examples in Which Knowledge Is Claimed to Affect Perception	76	(14)
2.6 Conclusions: Early Vision as a Cognitively Impenetrable System	90	(3)
3 The Architecture of the Early-Vision System: Components and Functions	93	(66)
3.1 Some Intrinsic Architectural Factors Determining What We See	93	(29)
3.2 What Is Computed by the Encapsulated Early-Vision System?	122	(20)
3.3 Some Subprocesses of the Visual System	142	(8)
3.4 Visual Control of Action: An Encapsulated System?	150	(6)
3.5 Interactions among Modular Systems	156	(3)
4 Focal Attention: How Cognition Influences Vision	159	(42)
4.1 Focal Attention in Visual Perception	160	(1)
4.2 Focal Attention as Selective Filtering	161	(5)
4.3 Allocation of Visual Attention	166	(7)
4.4 Individuation: A Precursor to Attentional Allocation?	173	(8)
4.5 Visual Attention Is Directed at Objects	181	(13)
4.6 Neuropsychological Evidence for Object-Based Information Access	194	(5)
4.7 What Is Selected in Visual Attention?	199	(2)
5 The Link between Vision and the World: Visual Indexes	201	(80)
5.1 Background: The Need to Keep Track of Individual Distal Objects	202	(7)
5.2 Visual-Index (or FINST) Theory	209	(14)
5.3 Empirical Support for the Visual-Index Theory	223	(19)
5.4 Why Do We Need a Special Connection between Vision and the World?	242	(17)
5.5 Indexes and the Development of the Object Concept in Infants	259	(9)
5.6 Possible Implementations of the FINST Indexing Mechanism	268	(7)
Appendix 5.A: Sketch of a Partial Network-Implementation of the FINST Indexing Mechanism	275	(6)
6 Seeing with the Mind's Eye: Part 1, The Puzzle of Mental Imagery	281	(78)
6.1 What Is the Puzzle about Mental Imagery?	281	(9)
6.2 Content, Form, and Substance of Representations	290	(3)
6.3 What Is Responsible for the Pattern of Results Obtained in Imagery Studies?	293	(35)
6.4 Some Alleged Properties of Images	328	(5)
6.5 Mental Imagery and Visual Perception	333	(26)
7 Seeing with the Mind's Eye: Part 2, The Search for a Spatial Display in the Brain	359	(68)
7.1 Real and "Functional" Space	359	(9)
7.2 Why Do We Think That Images Are Spatial?	368	(7)
7.3 Inheritance of Spatial Properties of Images from Perceived Space	375	(12)
7.4 The Search for a Real Spatial Display	387	(13)
7.5 What Would It Mean If All the Neurophysiological Claims Turned Out to Be True?	400	(19)
7.6 What, If Anything, Is Special about Mental Imagery?	419	(8)
8 Seeing with the Mind's Eye: Part 3, Visual Thinking	427	(48)
8.1 Different "Styles" of Thinking	427	(1)
8.2 Form and Content of Thoughts: What We Think with and What We Think about	428	(11)
8.3 How Can Visual Displays Help Us to Reason?	439	(19)
8.4 Thinking with Mental Diagrams	458	(6)
8.5 Imagery and Imagination	464	(11)
References	475	(42)
Name Index	517	(10)
Subject Index	527