Abstract
The work described in this chapter was originally motivated by an interest in understanding a fundamental unsolved problem in human perception—how we recognize an object, in view of the fact that there is an ambiguous and indirect mapping between information in the array of light intensities at the retina and the object. Movement of the observer’s eyes or body or of the object affect in highly variable ways the image of the object projected on the retina. The approach taken to this problem was to investigate the theoretical and psychophysical aspects of the ability to discriminate between identical or mostly similar objects at different orientations. As discussed below, people often find this discrimination too difficult and “correct” for the difference in the orientation of the objects by either imagining or physically producing a compensatory spatial transformation to align the objects with respect to either a scene-based or egocentric frame of reference. What happens is people do some initial perceptual processing of the objects, then produce some action or mental simulation of action, and then do more perceptual processing to form an internal representation of the object sufficiently detailed to allow a discrimination. So information and processes related to action interact (cyclically) with information and processes related to the perception of object shape. Although this kind of information processing has recently been the subject of theoretical concern,1 I will mostly discuss recent empirical findings.2
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Parsons, L.M. (1987). Spatial Transformations used in Imagination, Perception and Action. In: Vaina, L.M. (eds) Matters of Intelligence. Synthese Library, vol 188. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3833-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3833-5_6
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