Posted: Nov 04, 2013 9:45 pm
There’s a 2002 article here by Gerald Winer and Jane Cottrell: “Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception: Adults’ belief in visual emissions”. Apparently it’s a common idea that vision involves something coming from the eyes (children often believe it spontaneously), and the authors of the paper found that a surprisingly high proportion even of psychology students thought this was the case.
I came across this because Prof. Michael Graziano mentions it in his book “Consciousness and the social brain”, it seems to be one of the ways we’re wired up to misperceive physical phenomena. In a 2011 paper(page 4 of the pdf, page number 101), he writes:
I came across this because Prof. Michael Graziano mentions it in his book “Consciousness and the social brain”, it seems to be one of the ways we’re wired up to misperceive physical phenomena. In a 2011 paper(page 4 of the pdf, page number 101), he writes:
Michael Graziano wrote:Note the distinction between the reality (Bill’s attentional process) and the perceptual representation of the reality (Abel’s perception that Bill is aware). The reality is quite complex. It includes the physics of light entering the eye, the body orientation and gaze direction of Bill, and a large set of unseen neuronal processes in Bill’s brain. The perceptual representation of that reality is much simpler, containing an amorphous, somewhat ethereal property of awareness that can be spatially localized at least vaguely to Bill and that, in violation of the physics of optics, emanates from Bill toward the object of his awareness. (For a discussion of the widespread human perception that vision involves something coming out of the eyes, see Cottrell & Winer, 1994; Gross, 1999.) The perceptual model is simple, easy, implausible from the point of view of physics, but useful for keeping track of Bill’s state and therefore for helping to predict Bill’s behaviour. As in all perception, the perception of awareness is useful rather than accurate.