| What is the content of our visual experience? In short, what do we see? Vision scientists typically focus on the perception of basic visual features, such as color, motion, and shape. In contrast, this dissertation explores the intriguing possibility that visual processing also extracts seemingly more abstract properties. One example is aesthetic content: when we view a painting (or a street, or a beach, or nearly any visual stimulus), we are struck not only by its structure (e.g. the objects in it), but also by its intrinsic aesthetic appeal. Another example is inferred history : when we view a dented soda can, we are struck not only by its current shape, but by an immediate impression of how it came to be that way (i.e. by a dent having been imposed onto an originally undamaged shape). Both aesthetic appeal and causal history are usually thought of (by both scientists and laypeople) as examples of higher-level cognition---or if they are considered in the context of perception, they are seen as epiphenomenal (in that they don't seem to interact with more familiar types of visual processing). In contrast, this dissertation suggests that both causal history and aesthetic content are also extracted during automatic visual processing, and that such representations then have further unexpected influences on ocher forms of perception---as when perceived causal history influences motion perception, or when aesthetic appeal may alter the perception of ambiguous figures. This work collectively shows how visual perception may be richer and "smarter" than we typically assume. |
