ABSTRACT
The compelling phenomenological reality of visual space has rarely been questioned, let alone objectively tested, yet a unitary visual space stands as one of the key assumptions of most characterizations of human spatial vision. Here we evaluate the claim that all of our spatial judgments are determined by perceived locations of things in some personal phenomenal space. We show that if distortions of phenomenal visual space are spatially continuous (hence locally correlated) we can account for Weber’s law in length judgments, as well as the fall-off from Weber’s law observed at greater lengths. But experiments in the detection of a sinusoidal ripple fail to support the use of locations in a unitary space and suggest instead that features are located through distance or orientation measures relative to the objects to which the features belong. Experiments with the Zöllner and Müller-Lyer illusory figures fail to support the idea that apparent position completely determines apparent orientation (or vice versa). Instead, we suggest that special-purpose hardware underlies different spatial discriminations.
