Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 0 Introduction
- Part one Bayesian frameworks
- Commentaries
- Part two Implications and applications
- 6 Implications of a Bayesian formulation of visual information for processing for psychophysics
- 7 Shape from texture: Ideal observers and human psychophysics
- 8 A computational theory for binocular stereopsis
- 9 The generic viewpoint assumption in a Bayesian framework
- 10 Experiencing and perceiving visual surfaces
- 11 The perception of shading and reflectance
- 12 Banishing the homunculus
- Commentaries
- Author index
- Subject index
12 - Banishing the homunculus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 0 Introduction
- Part one Bayesian frameworks
- Commentaries
- Part two Implications and applications
- 6 Implications of a Bayesian formulation of visual information for processing for psychophysics
- 7 Shape from texture: Ideal observers and human psychophysics
- 8 A computational theory for binocular stereopsis
- 9 The generic viewpoint assumption in a Bayesian framework
- 10 Experiencing and perceiving visual surfaces
- 11 The perception of shading and reflectance
- 12 Banishing the homunculus
- Commentaries
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
The role of the homunculus
Ideas about perception have changed a great deal over the past half century. Before the discovery of maps of sensory surfaces in the cerebral cortex the consensus view was that perception involved “mind-stuff”, and because mind-stuff was not matter the greatest care was required in using crude, essentially materialistic, scientific methods and concepts to investigate and explain phenomena in which it had a hand. One approach was to reduce the role of this mind-stuff to a minimum by designing experiments so that the mind was used simply as a null-detector, analogous to a sensitive galvanometer in a Wheatstone bridge, which had to do no more than detect the identity or non-identity of two percepts. Those who followed this approach might be termed the hard-psychophysics school – exemplified by people such as Helmholtz, Stiles, Hecht and Rushton – and it had some brilliant successes in explaining the properties of sensation: for instance the trichromatic theory; the relation between the quality of the retinal image and visual acuity; and the relation between sensitivity and the absorption of quanta in photo-sensitive pigments. But it left the mystery of the mind-stuff untouched.
Others attempted to discover the properties of the mind-stuff by defining the physical stimuli required to elicit its verbally recognizable states – a soft-psychophysics approach that could be said to characterize the work of the Gestalt school and, for example, Hering, Gibson, and Hurvich and Jameson.
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- Perception as Bayesian Inference , pp. 425 - 450Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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