ABSTRACT
When I accepted the invitation to participate in this symposium, I promised to discuss some representative models of perception. It soon became apparent that the mathematical models currently being proposed are so numerous and so complex that it would require volumes to do justice to even one subspeciality, such as color vision or binocular vision. For example, simple linear matrix operations sufficed for the theory of color mixture for 100 years (Wyszecki and Stiles [1967]); today’s more comprehensive theories of color perception invoke additional nonlinear operations (e.g. Pugh and Mollon [1979]). 2 There are new developments in theories such as factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and cluster analysis which have been used to describe the mapping of physical stimuli (such as simple color patches but also much more complex stimuli) into psychologically significant space (Shepard [1980]). Measurement theory has evolved as a branch of mathematics to describe the mapping of physical stimulus dimensions (most often intensity) into psychological dimensions (Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky [1971], Roberts [1979]).
