Rainer Mausfeld

• Kiel University

Hoffman, Singh, and Prakash (Psychonomic Review and Bulletin, 2015, in press) intend to show that perceptions are evolutionarily tuned to fitness rather than to truth. I argue, partly in accordance with their objective, that issues of 'truth' or 'veridicality' have no place in explanatory accounts of perception theory, and rather belong to either o...

Lustrous surface appearances can be elicited by simple image configurations with no texture or specular highlights, as most prominently illustrated by Helmholtz' demonstration of stereoscopic lustre. Three types of explanatory framework have been proposed for stereoscopic lustre, which attribute the phenomenon to a binocular luminance conflict, an...

Sensory systems serve to link the organism to functionally relevant aspects of the physical environment. A mobile organism requires diverse information from the biological and physical environment and about its internal state for orientation and movement in space and in order to regulate and control its body and behavior. In the course of evolution...

Notions of "reality" and "realness" can appear in contexts other than perception theory, notably in ordinary discourse, theoretical physics, and philosophy. Theoretical issues of perception theory that can be subsumed under the heading of "phenomenal realness" are more easily recognizable when people do not confuse them with issues associated with...

The cognitive neurosciences are based on the idea that the level of neurons or neural networks constitutes a privileged level of analysis for the explanation of mental phenomena. This paper brings to mind several arguments to the effect that this presumption is ill-conceived and unwarranted in light of what is currently understood about the physica...

The field of colour perception has often been praised in recent years as a paradigm of cognitive science. While this certainly has some validity, it contrasts with the fact that the field makes very little contact with the sort of inquiries into mental representations to be found elsewhere in cognitive science (understood as naturalistic inquiries...

Colour has long been a source of fascination to both scientists and philosophers. In one sense, colours are in the mind of the beholder, in another sense they belong to the external world. Colours appear to lie on the boundary where we have divided the world into 'objective' and 'subjective' events. They represent, more than any other attribute of...

Die traditionelle Wahrnehmungspsychologie hat durch ihre physiologistische und physikalistische Orientierung und die damit verbundene Fokussierung auf elementaristische Wahrnehmungsattribute die interne Struktur der Wahrnehmung und damit die explanatorischen Aufgaben der Wahrnehmungs-psychologie in grundlegender Weise mißverstanden. Ihre Zugangswei...

It is a characteristic feature of our mental make-up that the same percep-tual input situation can simultaneously elicit conflicting mental perspectives. This ability pervades our perceptual and cognitive domains. Striking examples are the dual character of pictures in picture perception, pretend play, or the ability to employ metaphors and allegor...

Zusammenfassung. Die Psychologie weist zur Biologie, von der Genetik bis zur Ethologie, vielfaltige fruchtbare und in der Sache unproblematische Beziehungen auf. In den kognitiven Neurowissenschaften sind jedoch Vorstellungen problematisch, denen zufolge einer neurophysiologischen Analyseebene eine privilegierte Stellung fur das Verstandnis mentale...

S. Nishida and M. Shinya (1998) found that observers have only a limited ability to recover surface-reflectance properties under changes in surface shape. Our aim in the present study was to investigate how the degree of surface-reflectance constancy depends on the availability of information that may help to infer the reflectance and shape propert...

Colour is, according to prevailing orthodoxy in perceptual psychology, a kind of autonomous and unitary attribute. It is regarded as unitary or homogeneous by assuming that its core properties do not depend on the type of 'perceptual object' to which it pertains and that 'colour per se' constitutes a natural attribute in the functional architecture...

It is a characteristic feature of our mental make-up that the same perceptual input situation can simultaneously elicit conflicting mental perspectives. This ability pervades our perceptual and cognitive domains. Striking examples are the dual character of pictures in picture perception, pretend play, or the ability to employ metaphors and allegori...

The disparity of highlights on specular reflecting surfaces usually differs from the disparity of the surface points. A. Kirschmann (1895) proposed that this fact may be used as a binocular cue for gloss perception. This was confirmed by A. Blake and H. Bülthoff (1990) who found that subjects judged the glossiness of convex ellipsoidal surfaces as...

Unter allen psychischen Phänomenbereichen erscheint uns aus unserer Alltagsperspektive die Wahrnehmung am selbstverständlichsten und somit am wenigsten erklärungsbedürftig zu sein. Historisch entstand das Interesse an der Wahrnehmung aus der erkenntnistheoretischen Frage, wie sich ein Wissen über die Welt auf der Basis der durch die Sinne vermittel...

Most models of object recognition and mental rotation are based on the matching of an object's 2-D view with representations of the object stored in memory. They propose that a time-consuming normalization process compensates for any difference in viewpoint between the 2-D percept and the stored representation. Our experiment shows that such normal...

IntroductionThe Physicalistic Trap in Elementaristic Approaches to PerceptionThe Physicalistic Trap in Functionalist and Computational Approaches to PerceptionPerception Theory beyond the Physicalistic TrapAppendixAcknowledgementNotesReferences

The concept of ‘modes of appearances’ has an odd status in colour science. As a purely descriptive concept, which has emerged from attempts to classify well-established phenomenological observations of different ‘types’ of colour appearance, it is itself in need of an explanation in terms of some abstract principles of the internal coding of colour...

Byrne & Hilbert (B&H) conceive of color perception as the representation of a physical property “out there.” In our view, their approach does not only have various internal problems, but is also apt to becloud both the intricate and still poorly understood role that “color” plays within perceptual architecture, and the complex coupling to the “exte...

We argue, from an ethology-inspired perspective, that the internal concepts 'surface colours' and 'illumination colours' are part of the data format of two different representational primitives. Thus, the internal concept of 'colour' is not a unitary one but rather refers to two different types of 'data structure', each with its own proprietary typ...

Shepard's approach is regarded as an attempt to rescue, within an evolutionary perspective, an empiricist theory of mind. Contrary to this, I argue that the structure of perceptual representations is essentially co-determined by internal aspects and cannot be understood if we confine our attention to the physical side of perception, however appropr...

Sensorische Systeme dienen der Kopplung des Organismus an funktional relevante Aspekte der physikalischen Umwelt. Ortsbewegliche Organismen benötigen zur Bewegung, zur Steuerung und Kontrelle des Körpers im Raum und zur Verhaltenssteuerung vielfältige Informationen aus der biologisch-physikalischen Umwelt und öber Eigenzustände des Organismus. In d...

We provide evidence that the surround-dependent change in appearance of an infield in a centre - surround configuration is not to be understood as an elementary recoding of channels by a simple surround-dependent gain control but in fact mirrors the triggering of a much more complex mechanism for establishing a dual code for ‘object colour’ and ‘il...

There is no natural and pretheoretical classification of colour appearances into hue, saturation, brightness, unique hues, and so on. Rather, our theoretical insights into the coding of colour have reciprocally shaped the way we talk about colour appearances. Opponency is only one of many fundamental aspects of colour coding, and we are hardly...

Chichilnisky & Wandell [(1995). Vision Research, 35, 239-254], studying dichoptic asymmetric colour matching with haploscopically superimposed backgrounds explained their data in terms of a model that assumes incremental multiplicative sensitivity control. The model given in Mausfeld & Niederée [(1993). Perception, 22, 427-462] postulates a differe...

Geometric Representations of Perceptual Phenomena: Papers in Honor of Tarow Indow on His 70th Birthday (see record 1995-98415-000 ) is composed of a collection of presentations by a distinguished group of researchers delivered in 1993 at a conference in honor of Tarow Indow. The book centers around Indow's three major research topics: space, color,...

Centre-surround stimuli evoke colour appearances (resembling surface colours) which cannot be produced by a single homogeneous spot of light alone (eg brown or grey). Although this seems of great impact to a general theory of colour (including 'colour constancy'), the psychophysics of these 'minimal relational stimuli' is still less well understood...

Presents a theory of the relationship of the psychological and the physical and uses it to formulate a new kind of meaningfulness principle for psychophysical application. This new principle calls into question the psychological relevance of many kinds of quantitative psychophysical relationships. As an illustration, it is used to study comparisons...

The present paper discusses some theoretical questions pertaining to the ‘discounting the background’ hypothesis and its relation to opponent colour theory. Different such hypotheses are distinguished and their relation is outlined. Emphasis is placed on juxtaposing qualitative laws and quantitative representations thereof, as common in measurement...

The paper gives a short account of a new model for asymmetric colour matching. It generalizes affine models previously proposed in the literature, starting from Walraven’s (1976) “discounting the background” principle. The characteristic feature of the model proposed is that it allows different v.Kries-type multiplicative transformations for increm...

A generalization of the customary models for pair comparison data is presented in a parameter free way. For this general model, called Fechnerian structure, a maximum likelihood estimation procedure is proposed based on a two phase isotonic regression technique.

Im letzten Heft dieser Zeitschrift haben uns führende Vertreter der Biologischen Psychologie an ihren Visionen der Entwicklung des Faches teilhaben lassen. Dabei markieren sie den Weg, der uns davor bewahren soll, dass "die gesamte Psychologie rasch als Wissenschaft an Bedeutung verlieren (wird) und zu einem Studium für fragwürdige Professionalität...

Das Faszinierende an der Erforschung des Geistes/Gehirns ist, daß man, unabhängig vom Ausgangs-punkt, immer auf dieselben tiefliegenden Fragen trifft, die mit einem theoretischen Verständnis der ‚Natur des Geistigen' verbunden sind. Selbst Bereiche, die auf den ersten Blick für ein solches Verständnis wenig ergiebig erscheinen, weil sie an der Ober...

Colour is one of the most conspicuous aspects of visual experiences. Together with shape it imparts objects their individual distinctiveness and is a salient characteristic of the appearance of objects. Whereas shape is a property of physical objects that seems to be intrinsic to them, apparently a necessary part of their physical description, the...

Zusammenfassung Ein neuartiger, auf Konzepten der Ethologie basierender Zugang zur Untersuchung von Elementarkategorien bzw. Grundkonzepten der Wahrnehmung wird vorgestellt und für eine Untersuchung der Beziehung von perzeptueller Objekt-und Beleuchtungsfarbe in der Farbwahrnehmung herangezogen. Eine durch Elementarkategorien vermittelte Zerlegung...