ABSTRACT
This book has been written to review and evaluate the state of the psychological sciences in the 1980s with regard to our understanding ofhow people see forms. I have sought to develop a minitaxonomy of the various stages of visual information processing-detection, discrimination, and recognition-that I believe represents the core of the visual-perception problem. These processes can generally be considered to be somewhat "higher level" than most of the visual processes discussed in my earlier works (Uttal, 1973b, 1978, 1981), in that they more likeIy than not involve neural networks for their execution that are more central and more compiex than the primarily transductive, communicative, or initial encoding mechanisms previousIy emphasized.
