Magazine
May-June 2002
May-June 2002
Volume: 90 Number: 3
In this computer-generated scene, our perception of a color changes with different backgrounds. Specifically, the blue circle surrounded by yellow ones looks darker than the blue circle surrounded by green ones, which in turn looks darker than the blue circle largely in shadow. Covering everything but these three blue circles with a mask reveals that they are all the same color. In fact everything that people see suffers from ambiguity, and our visual system solves that problem by relying on an empirical approach—perceiving images as what they turned out to be in the past. In "Why We See What We Do," Dale Purves, R. Beau Lotto and Surajit Nundy explore this empirical hypotehsis of visual perception. (Image by R. Beau Lotto.)
In This Issue
- Art
- Astronomy
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Communications
- Computer
- Economics
- Engineering
- Environment
- Ethics
- Evolution
- Mathematics
- Medicine
- Physics
- Policy
- Psychology
- Sociology
- Technology
The Global Transport of Dust
Dale Griffin, Christina Kellogg, Virginia Garrison, Eugene Shinn
Chemistry Environment Physics
An intercontinental river of dust, microorganisms and toxic chemicals flows through the Earth's atmosphere
Hybridization and Extinction
Donald Levin
Environment Policy
In protecting rare species, conservationists should consider the dangers of interbreeding, which compound the more well-known threats to wildlife
Quantum Identity
Peter Pesic
Physics
Physicists have long struggled with the weirdness of quantum mechanics—a consequence of like particles being completely indistinguishable from one another
Why We See What We Do
Dale Purves, Surajit Nundy
Psychology
A probabilistic strategy based on past experience explains the remarkable difference between what we see and physical reality
