Comments on: Margaret S. Livingstone's Lecture

I thought this keynote address was very interesting. Linvingstone does a great job showing that vision is information processing, not information transmission through the use of illusions that in actuality do not look how we visualize them. For example, the picture on the upper left here is a great example of this. Staring at one square, the intersection at the corners of every other square looks like it contains a gray dot. However, in reality the picture has no grey dots, it is just a mistake being made by our visual system transferring the information on the computer screen into our brains.

I also found it very interesting how you can have impossible figures. When the local depth cues are all fine, even if the laws of physics are defied, your brain interprets the information it receives to be alright. For example, this image shows a staircase that could never exist in real life. However, our brain only sees the small parts of the image our eyes are focused on, and as long as those look ok, the brain assumes the whole image is ok. Becuase our vision only checks exactly where we are looking rather than the whole image, the image as a whole can be impossible but be perceived as ok by the brain.