ABSTRACT
We take far too much for granted our wonderful ability to visually recognise, rapidly, effortlessly and accurately, people, objects, instances and events, despite an enormous range of often very degraded viewing conditions. We can recognise cups, cars, cats and caterpillars far better than any computer. It is amazing that things so rarely go awry, with failure to recognise someone or something, or occasionally falsely recognising them as someone or something else, or very rarely indeed, firmly continuing to believe that things are really very different from reality. Such delusional beliefs will be the subject of this section. All acts, however, of recognition, or of delusory misidentification, involve the interface between perception – seeing the presence of something – and memory – recognising something for what it is in the context of past experiences.
