ABSTRACT
YO U A R E WA L K I N G D OW N a busy street. There are shop frontsdisplaying their goods; there are buses, cars and people walking their dogs; there are some people we recognise and others we have never seen before. All these objects are made up from different colours, shapes and sizes, in different places. Yet we ‘see’ buses, cars, people and dogs, signs and goods in the shop windows; we experience the visual world as a unified whole with unified objects within it. We can recognise a bus, a car or a person from many different angles, as they move with respect to us. The signs on the shops are all in different designs of writing, but we read them effortlessly. As we saw in the previous chapters, there is good evidence that different parts of the brain are concerned with processing information about shape, movement, depth and colour while other pathways code where an object is and what it is, or how to act on it. One of the ways in which this combination of attributes or features can be achieved is by focusing attention on them (Treisman, 1988); we discussed feature integration theory in the previous chapter.
