ABSTRACT
The process by which an individual becomes aware of something is called perception, and psychological investigators have been concerned with it for generations. The symbol-process then comes to occur in the absence of another person and even in the absence of the stimulating object to which the original perception was specific. Both conventional and non-conventional surrogates may, of course, be relatively unspecific to their referents, and to this extent the resulting perceptions will also be unspecific. The sacrificing of fidelity, that is to say distortion, should have the result of making the observer’s perception vague and his behavior unspecific, as a general rule. The issues involved in picture-viewing are highly complex, including as they do problems of spatial perception and perceptual constancy. The perception of pictures viewed obliquely, i.e., at an angle to the surface, presents a similar set of problems regarding phenomenal distortion and phenomenal constancy.
