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The Logic of Perception
The theory of visual perception that Irvin Rock develops and supports in this book with numerous original experiments, views perception as the outcome of a process of unconscious inference, problem solving, and the building of structural descriptions of the external world. It is a radical departure from his earlier work and contrasts with traditional perceptual theories like those of James J. Gibson or the Gestalt view.
Rock experiments with a series of phenomena, like motion perception, illusory contours, and size and brightness constancy, and shows that they can be understood in terms of the knowledge applied by the visual system to the interpretation of the retinal image. His work largely complements that being done in artificial intelligence, demonstrating that the visual system is far more subtle and intelligent in many tasks which have not yet been modelled on the computer.
Irvin Rock, a noted investigator of perceptual phenomena for nearly three decades, is Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University.
Rock experiments with a series of phenomena, like motion perception, illusory contours, and size and brightness constancy, and shows that they can be understood in terms of the knowledge applied by the visual system to the interpretation of the retinal image. His work largely complements that being done in artificial intelligence, demonstrating that the visual system is far more subtle and intelligent in many tasks which have not yet been modelled on the computer.
Irvin Rock, a noted investigator of perceptual phenomena for nearly three decades, is Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University.
384 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1985
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About the author
Irvin Rock
18 books4 followersIrvin Rock (1922–1995) was an American experimential psychologist who studied visual perception at the University of California at Berkeley.
His The Logic of Perception led to him being regarded as an excellent perception psychologist. Rock is notable in the field of psychology for his 1957 experiment where he tilted a square to make it look like a diamond and then tilted his test subjects and asked them what shape they saw. The experiment tested Rock's hypothesis that perceptual phenomena could be explained by higher-level mental processes instead of merely by automatic processes. When his test subjects continued to perceive the shape as a diamond after being tilted to view the shape as a square, Rock concluded that perception is an intelligent, higher-level mental process. This differed from previous conclusions by Gestalt psychologists that perception was not a higher-level process. Rock later wrote another important book on the field of inattentional blindness.
His The Logic of Perception led to him being regarded as an excellent perception psychologist. Rock is notable in the field of psychology for his 1957 experiment where he tilted a square to make it look like a diamond and then tilted his test subjects and asked them what shape they saw. The experiment tested Rock's hypothesis that perceptual phenomena could be explained by higher-level mental processes instead of merely by automatic processes. When his test subjects continued to perceive the shape as a diamond after being tilted to view the shape as a square, Rock concluded that perception is an intelligent, higher-level mental process. This differed from previous conclusions by Gestalt psychologists that perception was not a higher-level process. Rock later wrote another important book on the field of inattentional blindness.
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