Chapter Overview

This chapter emphasized that visual information is used to distinguish objects from their backgrounds and to discriminate objects from one another. After presenting two traditional views of form perception, structuralism and Gestalt psychology, we described the multi-channel model derived from measurements of the CSF. This model is an attempt to relate human form perception to what is known about the visual cortex. The model can account for many aspects of human and animal vision, including detection, discrimination, and certain visual illusions, but it, too, has its limitations. In the next chapter, the focus shifts to how the visual system puts together the information it acquires to generate useful representations of objects.