Myrto Karanika (ma701mk)

Visual Perception: a cognitive process

There is not an image that is not the perception of an image ( Aumont, 1997).

Introduction
In order to make sense of the world, the brain gathers and processes information it receives from the five senses. Visual perception is a critical part of this process and should not be considered as simply a passive recording of visible material. We do not always see things the way they are or as they relate to their environment. Only a part of what is perceived derives straight from our visual system, whilst the rest is the result of our interpretation, lets say the intellectual. In this essay, I will describe and differentiate between the processes of receiving and analysing visual data in an effort to understand what it is that we see. I will assert that these two processes, though seemingly discrete, cannot be considered separately, as it is their instant merging that creates what we call visual perception. In an effort to explore how visual perception is a product of cognition, consciousness, seeing and knowledge, I will use art, and in particular childrens drawings, as an analysing parameter.

Visual Perception: the visible and the intellectual

The visual brain As far as the visual system is concerned, perception is purposeful and selective. The selectivity of our visual perception is greatly dependent upon our distinct attention and visual search. The former involves a kind of focalisation on important aspects of the visual field and the periphery of the visual field, whereas the latter includes the process of linking several fixations on the same visual scene to allow more detailed exploration. The integration of all these fixations is an immediate and instinctive process that creates what we call our vision of an image.

But what are the main elements that we visually perceive? Luminosity. The response of the visual system to the actual quantity (intensity) of light sent out by an object. Colour Vision. The response of the visual system to the wavelength of light rays sent out or reflected by objects. Visual Edges. The response of the visual system to the spatial distribution of light, meaning the spatial limits of objects, their visual edges, outlines. Contrast. The response of the visual system to the interaction of luminosity and edges.

These elements are never perceived in isolation but always in relation to each other, they are produced simultaneously and therefore, the perception of each has an effect on the perception of the others. The major visual pathway from the retina to the brain is known as the optic pathway. It carries signals to the primary visual cortex, or V1 for short, situated at the back of the brain. In the V1, cells that receive signals for the features of vision outlined above are neatly grouped together into different, anatomically identifiable compartments. The specialised compartments of the V1 send their signals to further visual areas. These further visual areas are located in a large area of the cortex that surrounds the V1, which until recently was referred as the visual association cortex. They are themselves functionally specialised, but collectively they work to create the visual scene. So, the visual brain consists of many operationally distinct areas that work symphonically to produce an image, with the V1 serving as the royal gateway, providing a link to the retina. Each visual area works as a specialised processing system, devoted to a particular feature of the visual scene, which allows the brain to collect different attributes of the visual scene simultaneously and in parallel. But the specialised areas do not all connect with a master area, which can then interpret or understand what they have processed; there is no single master area to which all the visual areas uniquely project. So how exactly do the operations performed by the different visual areas integrate to give us our unitary image of the visual world? Functional specialisation suggests a temporal hierarchy in vision, suggesting in turn that the processing systems are also perceptual systems. But, by definition, perception is a conscious act. Are, then, seeing and understanding indeed two separate processes, with separate seats in the cortex?

Kant had put forward the view that the mind could be divided in two faculties, the passive one of sensibility, concerned with the collection of raw data, and the active one of understanding, or in other words intellect, which made sense of the raw data.

The intellect

intellect intl ekt |n(t)lkt| |ntlkt|

noun the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, esp. with regard to abstract matters
The intellect relates to a series of mental operations, which occur to manufacture the perception of an image. These involve receiving, storing and identifying the visual information, and therefore are significantly linked to memory, thinking and learning. Such processes include active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem solving, combining, as well as separating and putting in context (Arnheim, 1969). These procedures may be carried out instinctively or intentionally and they construct the ways in which we filter, translate and understand what it is that we see.

The co-relation The connection between the material and the mental in vision is uncertain; our mental image of what we see is importantly different from its retinal projection. The eye focuses an image of the object upon the retina, then messages are carried to the brain and certain physical and chemical effects vibrate the muscles and the nerves. From our early years upwards these functions are increasingly subordinated to higher order cognitive processes taking place at other levels of our cortex. And there appears consciousness: what we understand of what we see is a mixture of complex visual judgments that are then passed into more complex intellectual judgments. Undoubtedly the simple perceptual processes do still function to provide sensory data on which the operation of the more complex processes depends. But it is the more complex processes, which normally determine our understanding of and response to the environment. Here lays an interesting example of how these complex processes work: When we move through an environment, we perceive an accordingly continuous change of the projective sizes of all the objects that surround us. The setting as a whole is subjected to a unified and constant adjustment in size; each part of the visual field is in constant relation, and hence variability to every other part, and any particular entity is evaluated in relation to its complex content. In terms of vision, we are receiving full information on these contextual changes, but the intellect consciously ignores this rich information in favour of constancy. What we actually see and what we understand of seeing are two different things but are visually perceived as one and the same in terms of our need for continuity and stability. An answer to the co-relation of vision and the visible can be found in the Synthetic Approach of visual perception, which proposes that we find equivalents for the visual world in stimuli alone. In other words, it suggests that our perception mechanism is sophisticated enough to recognize objects in space simply from an optical image on the retina. Although the optical image projected upon the retina is a mechanically complete recording of an image, the equivalent visual perception is not. The perception of a shape is the understanding of structural characteristics found in, or imposed upon, the stimulus material. The Gestalt Theory rests on this approach emphasising on the natural competence of the brain to organise visual information according to universal and

unchanging laws, such as Proximity/ Contiguity, Similarity, Closure/ Good Continuation, Simplicity, Area/ Smallness, Figure and Ground. The intellectual judgments will organize the stimulus material according to the simplest pattern compatible with it, based on its essential structural characteristics (see Gestalt Theory Appendix). Perception consists in fitting the stimulus material with templates of relatively similar shape, which can be called visual concepts or visual categories. The simplicity of these visual concepts is relative, in that a complex stimulus pattern viewed by refined vision may produce a rather intricate shape, which is the simplest attainable under the circumstances. What matters is that an object at which someone is looking can be said to be truly perceived only to the extent to which it is fitted to some organised shape (Arnheim, 1969). Simple form and movement perception are integrated with and supported by processes of identification, classification and coding through the operation of perceptual schemata which depend to a considerable extend on learning, memory, attention, reasoning and language. An interesting illustration of the cognitive operations of visual perception is presented in the words of a French surgeon, Moreau, who had anticipated the return of vision to his 8-year-old patient with enthusiasm. To Moreaus surprise, it took the boy many months of training before he could recognise a few objects by sight and two years after the operation much of what he had visually learned had been forgotten. Moreau wrote: It would be an error to suppose that a patient whose sight has been restored to him by surgical intervention can thereafter see the external world. The eyes have certainly obtained the power to see, but the employment of this power still has to be acquired from the very beginning. The operation itself has no more value than that of preparing the eye to see; education is the most important factor. The visual cortex can only register and preserve the visual impressions after a process of learning. To give back his sight to a congenitally blind patient is more the work of an educationalist than that of a surgeon. The fore mentioned example shows that, although the visual mechanism is irrespective of any learning through experience, visual perception is not. Visual education proceeds spontaneously until we build a sufficiently vast record to provide us with a blueprint for instant recognition and apparently effortless understanding of our visual world. And, as art holds an important role in visual education, it would be interesting to approach and analyse visual perception through some examples of art.

Understanding visual perception through art

The creation of art begs questions of selection and organisation; to make an object visible means to intellectually grasp its essential features. One cannot depict imagery or state without working out its character in terms of the image. Artistic activity is a form of reasoning, in which gathering visual data and intellectually processing it are indivisibly intertwined. Visual representations work

as evidence for the union of vision and cognition. They depend greatly on our library of visual information and are equally affected by an inner process of perception, and therefore overlap in relation to our psychological judgment. JeanPierre Charpy spoke of the representation of an image, in psychological terms, as the organisation of existential relations experienced with their instinctual force, with a predominantly affective sensorial register (tactile or visual) and a defensive intellectual organisation (Charpy, 1976). If art is the result of thinking with our senses, and if visual perception is indispensable for artistic creation, then we can undoubtedly trace visual perception in the images of art. And, therefore, analysing certain images of art can prove to be a methodology for depicting the essence of visual perception. Following the thought and examples of Arnheim (Visual Thinking, 1969), I will use pictorial representation as a starting point from which conclusions about the way visual perception works will derive. The shapes and relation that characterise concepts will be used as tools for a deepening of understanding of visual perception. Childrens drawings will be examined, because a childs mind works with basic forms easily distinguished by the complex objects they represent. Therefore, despite the lack of learned skill, a childs thought is a precise record of what he/she visually perceives. Example 1 (perception of relation) Chimneys and roofs

Children usually draw chimneys diagonally on the roof rather than vertically. In terms of vision, such a depiction seems to be wrong -as a chimney could never actually be seen as represented in sketch (a)-. When approached, however, under the spectrum of the intellectual, the representation suddenly makes much sense, as it is an attempt to spatially solve the problem of how the chimney rests on a slanted roof. It is a logical solution of providing the chimney a stable position on the roof, following the childs general understanding of how the vertical suggests stability upon a flat surface through perpendicular balance. The wronglooking relation between the chimney and the roof is justified by the notion that the visual perception of this relation equally depends on the visual information received by the child and his try to fit it in the norms of a generality, or, like the Gestalt theorists would put it, to fit in universal laws. Example 2 (perception of abstract shapes and their relation) The picture of a horse and a rider drawn by a three and a half years old girl

The horse is represented as an abstract volume that carries the rider. The oval shape represents the horse and the horizontal line represents the concept of the

rider sitting on the horse. The quite primitive representation provides evidence of a mind freely discovering relevant structural features of the visual stimuli and finding satisfactory shapes for them. But the relation of the two elements leaves the man floating in the oval shape. To solve this problem the girl introduces the horizontal line, which is not the horses back, but is support to the abstract, although completely visual. This picture clearly records the girls visual concepts that are produced by direct experience (vision) but abstractly depicted by means of shape, relation and function (intellectual). Starting entirely from intense observation of the visible, she conceptually interprets the depicted scene as the elementary relation of the two pure shapes: the relation between the two is as important in her representation as the horse and the rider themselves. Example 3 (perception of function) A balloon salesman drawn by a seven to eight years old boy

In a real environment a balloon salesman is a fairly complicated spectacle. The scene of a moving figure, surrounded by lots of people, creates a confusion that requires more than the sense of sight to be solved. The spatial arrangement of this picture makes confusion disappear by presenting an organisation of function. The main interest of the boy, the salesman, is placed in the middle of the drawing and the background is left empty. What happens to the left and to the right of the man is symmetrically treated for the child intends no functional difference between the two. Moreover, the even distribution of the balloons in space indicates that they are equal in terms of function. The whole picture is not a representation of a very specific view of the scene witnessed by the boy, it is just his clearest possible visual representation of the scene in terms of hierarchy. It is the result of his visual perception finding order in the observed disorder.

Conclusion
The analysis of the childrens drawings explains how an image is only understandable by generalizing its characteristics and by the dynamic of these characteristics relation. Visual perception starts with a raw visual material received by the eye, then transferred to and analysed by the visual brain and then it greatly depends on the range of imagery available through memory and organised by a total lifetimes experience into a system of visual concepts. The mind manipulates these concepts merging sensual perception and stored

experience. Visual perception does not objectively accord with the world as-it-is, as the world as-it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness. The three examples of the childrens early, elementary drawings bring out the imaginative, inventive and admirable process of visual perception. Each childs way of seeing is reconstructed by the marks he or she makes on the paper. The drawing represents his experience of the visible; the data of his visual experience are transformed into an abstract and independent visual representation, revealing an inner process through which each mechanical recording of sensory elements undergoes. A long list of empirical observation, experiments and theories has taken place around the interrelation of the visual brain and the higher cognitive operations that produce our understanding of what we see, but no satisfactory answer has yet been given on the ways these two interact. Many scientists, psychologists, theorists and artists have addressed the issue from different perspectives, but are still lacking in agreement. Although most of this interrelation still remains a mystery, clearly the processes of receiving and analysing visual data must be considered jointly, for one cannot explain either without the other.

Gestalt Principles Appendix

Brightness Contrast

Flat to Three-Dimensional

Contour Line to Solid Form

Distortion

Various Views

Units to Whole

Continuity

Syncopation Rythym

Random to Order

Closure

Grouping by Similarity

Grouping by proximity

Hard Edge Overlap

Figure Ground Contrast

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Bibliography Aumont, Jaques, The Image, British Film Institute, 1997 Arnheim, Rudolf, Visual Thinking, University of California Press, 1969 Koffka, Kurt, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935 Zeki, Semir, Inner Vision, Oxford University Press, 1999 Vernon, M.D., Perception Through Experience, T. & A. Constable Ltd, 1970 Stephen Gordon & Jenifer Wyman, Primer of Perception, Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1967

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