Brain, Vol. 123, No. 1, 185-187,
January 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press
Book reviews |
VISION AND ACTION.
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MacKay Institute of Communication and Neuroscience, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK
This book is derived from an international conference on vision and action, held at York University, Canada. The contributors are from three disciplines: psychology, computer science and neuroscience. They share the belief that perceptual senses do not function in isolation: the visual and motor processes involved in driving a car, catching a ball or playing table tennis interact. For instance, moving the head provides useful cues for interpreting the visual scene, due to motion parallax; conversely, the changing visual input can provide important information about the motion of the observer.
The editors, Laurence R. Harris and Michael Jenkin, attempt to take vision research back into the real world. They argue that many laws of psychophysics have been established in the laboratory under simplified conditions and these laws do not transfer to vision in a complex, natural environment. The reason for the failure of generality is the interaction between parameters; reduced
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