Stimulus Registration and Interpretation

Abstract

The current chapter deals with selected topics in visual perception. Perception is a very broad term, however, and thus it is desirable to begin with a brief statement as to the type of topics that will, and will not, be considered in the present context. Primarily because of space limitations, only research involving “higher” perceptual processes within the visual modality will be discussed. Restricting one’s coverage to visual perception is commonly justified by authors of books in cognition and perception because a disproportionate amount of the research on perceptual processes has focused on vision rather than any of the other sense modalities. This is not quite so true in research on aging as there have been numerous investigations of adult age differences in auditory processes, but it is still the case that the majority of the research of interest to cognitive psychologists has employed visually presented stimuli. Studies primarily concerned with sensory factors will be ignored because the amount of relevant material is so vast that entire books have recently appeared on this topic (e.g., Colavita, 1978; Corso, 1981), and to attempt to do justice to this topic would take us too far from the major focus on cognitive processes.