Abstract:

In the psychophysical study of visual perception we have made tremendous progress in predicting visual performance, and less progress in predicting visual experience. I argue that this is due to the scientific approach that we adopted to study visual perception. The psychophysical approach has its ontological roots in physics, and has focussed on objectivity, whereas the nature of visual experience is inherently subjective. In this talk, I outline the main assumptions of the physics-inspired approach, and examine how they might have alienated us from the study of visual experience. In the second part, I report experiments on edge and contour sensitivity, which probed visual performance and visual experience, respectively. I discuss their pros and cons, and contemplate how we might scientifically approach a subjective object of study like our experience of the visual world.