of these modules.
And today, we're going to be
talking about seeing geometry.
I told you a little bit in
the first of the sessions
about some of the anomalies in
the phenomenology of perceived geometry.
And I want to come back and remind you
about these to make it clear that again,
when it has a major problem
in relating perception to
the real world that any theory
of vision is obliged to explain.
So in the upper part of the diagram here,
are some classic examples that you see
in all, virtually all psychology books.
These effects are illusions,
as they're called.
Again, I always hesitate to use that
term because I want to remind you that
illusions is a dangerous idea.
We just see the world the way we do,
and the implication that
we sometimes see it right and sometimes
see it wrong is not a good idea at all.
Each of these are, are,
classically depicted.
They've been around since the early part
of the 20th century, or late 19th century.
They each have a name, and
let me explain them to you.
This is an effect that is attributed
to haring, the same you know,
the haring we talked about last time,
in the context of color reportantcy.
And what's apparent here is that
the two red lines that you see
are actually parallel in terms of
their physical presentation, but
when you see them super imposed
on an array of radiating lines,
the black lines, the, the two red lines.
Over parallel they look
bowed out in the middle.
This effect is called
the Poggendorff illusion and
the phenomenon here is that
the red line is co-linear.
That is it's the same line, but if you
look at the segment on the left, and
compare its position along the occluding
bar, the occluding black bar on the right,
it looks like the exit, from behind the
black bar on the right, this segment looks
a little bit higher than the entrance
of the collinear line on the left.
This phenomenon is called the T-effect or
the inverted T-effect and
we're going to come back to this and
i.e color.
In both those cases, the answer seem
to lie in getting around the obstacle
that I've referred to as the inverse
problem, and I just want to remind you,
I've told you this before, but I want to
remind you that the same basic problem
applies in geometry, as in these
other domains of visual perception.
So, you remember this diagram
that here the eye obviously and
here in the retina, the projection of
different objects in the real world.
These objects are of different sizes,
different orientations different
distances from the observer,
but they're all projecting in the same way
as an identical stimulus on the retina.
So size, distance, and orientation
are all conflated in the retinal image.
And this is a huge problem.
So, what is the significance
of an image feature?
We'll say a vertical line here,
projecting on the retina for behavior, and
it should be obvious from this that
these geometrical features
are inherently uncertain.
And [COUGH] the implication here
again as I've mentioned before,
is that we don't have any
way of getting around this
problem in,
in a sort of logical analytical way.
And that's the implication
of this kind of diagram.
That there's just no logical
solution to figuring out
what the meaning of the geometry
of a retinal image is,
in terms of what we have to
respond to in the real world.
So the question this raises is how is it
going to behave appropriately, because we
obviously do, in response to all kinds of
geometrical features and retinal images.
We respond to them appropriately,
in the real world,
but it's really hard to
see how we're doing that.
And as I said, there's no intuitive way
of I think, understanding the phenomenon
that I've told you, that would make
the explanation in any sense an easy one.