Human Perception of Objects: Early Visual Processing of Spatial Form Defined by Luminance, Color, Texture, Motion, and Binocular Disparity

This upper-level textbook presents a detailed and systematic treatment of how we see objects and discriminate their shapes. It begins with the concepts of modern psychophysical vision research, making a sharp distinction between research on human visual system function and research on visual system physiology ("psychophysics is not physiology"), before detailing aspects of the processes that allow us to distinguish objects from their surroundings. The author then forms an integrated model of these processes, drawing on material in earlier chapters. For the reader with little or no knowledge of differential calculus, brief tutorial asides are inserted into the main text. More advanced material is collected into ten appendices that present the material correctly, but are accessible to students with little background in physics and mathematics.