Neuropsychology of Perception

Abstract

Perceptual science occupies a rather interesting position within the cognate areas of neuropsychology. It is perhaps the only discipline that is, at once, both widely applied in neuropsychology and yet seems to have had no major impact in the way of producing a transfer of constructs and influencing the conceptual basis of neuropsychological assessment. Consider how current constructs from memory research such as “depth of processing” or “episodic memory” have worked their way into neuropsychological analysis. Parallels from perception are hard to find. Given the long history of research and theory construction in perception and, indeed, its central position in the history of psychology, one would expect a tremendously active and very current use of perceptual constructs in neuropsychology. Perhaps one source of perceptual science’s lack of vigorous input into neuropsychology is the immediacy of the content, the apparent face validity of any construct that one uses, at any level of analysis. Consider the example of “visual closure.” People do tend to fill in open forms as the Gestalt law of closure aptly demonstrates. It is not surprising, therefore, that Colarusso and Hammill (1972) examine this “basic” skill as one of five types in their Motor-Free Visual Perception Test. Here the child must choose the correct (closed) form from various figures drawn incompletely with gaps within one or more line elements.