ABSTRACT
The more the eyes have seen, the more the mind sees. —Bernard de Fontenelle
William James (1890/1950) described the task of psychology as “looking into our minds and reporting what we there discover” (p. 185). Although our methods are more advanced today than they were in James’ time (his quote described introspection), our goal remains the same: to describe and explain mental activities such as attention, perception, memory, concepts, thinking, and so forth. One important strategy in meeting this goal is to investigate properties of the visual system. Visual and visual-motor areas occupy a large part of the primate cortex (see Fig. 4.1), and it follows that much of our mental activity is visually based. Studies of the visual system have a relatively long history, and much is known about visual processing in a variety of species, including humans (Crick, 1994; Zeki, 1993).
