How we got to the muddle of "The Hard Problem" in psychology

Once upon a time we knew almost nothing about how vision worked, then, at just about the same time, all of the following happened:

1. Artists figured out perspectival drawing, and people went nuts over it.
2. It was discovered that they eye of a bull could act like a “camera obscura.” Camera obscuras were small dark rooms in the middle of a garden, built so that they cast an inverted view of the garden in one wall, by virtue of a pinhole in the opposite wall. Those were all the rage, because rich creepers could jerk off in them while spying on the ladies walking the garden. At that point, everyone assumed that vision was this passive thing that started with a still image in the back of the eye, and involved the opposite of whatever intellectual activity artists engaged in when creating a flat picture.

Modularity and the study of visual perception - Marr and Gibson

Gibson’s 1966 book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems recently turned 50. Two issues of the journal Ecological Psychology commemorated that event (here, and here). This is the second in a series of posts reviewing those contributions.

Vision research was impacted tremendously by the short career of David Marr. Marr was tremendously impacted by James J. Gibson, though mostly by Gibson's earlier work on optic flow, and not by his later works that birthed Ecological Psychology. Marr was incredibly influential in the move towards thinking of vision (and neuroscience in general) as "modular", while most of Gibson's work would lead one away from modular thinking. It is this tension that motivates Sedgwick and Gillam's article "A Non-Modular Approach to Visual Space Perception."