Chapter Overview

These last two chapters have provided an overview of some of the neural machinery of visual perception, including the multiple visual areas scattered throughout the brain. We are now ready to shift the focus to perception itself. In the next several chapters, we are going to examine different aspects, or qualities, of vision. These qualities of vision - shape, color, movement, and depth - serve to differentiate objects from one another. In discussing each of these qualities of vision, we shall treat them as the final product of the visual system's processing. We shall consider what sort of mechanism would be needed to yield this product. However, the major emphasis will be on what is seen, rather than on how.