ABSTRACT
This book opened with the fundamental epistemological question: How do humans acquire infonnation about the external world? This all-too-general query was quickly particularlized to the more limited topic of visual perception and to a series of questions of somewhat greater specificity. It would be most satisfying if I were able to close this book with a summary chapter that answered the questions that I posed in Chapter 1. Unfortunately, this is not to be, as I am sure any reader of this book must have been aware from the very beginning. Those questions constitute the skeleton of a program of inquiry that has hardly begun. In concluding this book I acknowledge that there is as yet no grand metatheory of the more automatic, preattentive aspects of visual perception, any more than there is of its active and attentive components; this book fills the great need for a global "explanation" of perception no better than any of its predecessors.
