A Creative Genius for Vision

1. A Creative Genius for Vision Visual Intelligence Donald D. Hoffman Chapter One

2. The Genius of Vision • Everything you see, you construct • Our visual prowess is a genius that often goes unrecognized • Yet, we construct scenes that contradict reality • Is our vision or our hand erroneous? • Can there be elements in the picture causing the problem?

3. More Evidence The “Magic Square” Brighter inside is a vision or photometer error? Ironically, the boundary increase makes the construction of the square difficult

4. More Evidence The Devil’s Triangle • Vision can do more than fabricate a structure, as it goes against reality • We build a triangle, even though this could be a structure photographed at a specific angle

5. “What you see” • There are elegant principles being applied when constructing an image • Phenomenal sense – The way things appear to us, objects we construct regardless of reality constraints • Relational sense – what you interact with when you see, things must exist to be seen • The phenomenal sense applies to our “visual genius” • Visual experiences serve as user-friendly computer icon interface with those things we relationally see

6. Vision Comes Naturally • Unlike the ability to walk or talk, humans can see upon birth • It is also an ability that we share with animals alike • Gold fish have four color receptors • Honeybees see ultraviolet light • Is our vision the correct vision?

7. A Child’s Visual Development • One month – infants blink if something moves toward their eyes • 3 months – infants use visual motion to construct boundaries of objects • 4 months – use motion and stereovision to construct 3D shapes of objects • 7 months – use shading, perspective, and interposition to construct depth and shape • One year – visual geniuses that begin to learn the name of objects

8. Visual Construction in Nature Blackbird Nestlings • For some species, their visual construction displays less genius • But no different than humans, this leaves room for visual errors

9. Visual Construction in Nature View of Chickens and Ducks The Common Toad

10. Brief History • Ptolemy (2nd century AD) – recognized in Optics is a dictate of logic • Alhazen (965-1039) – visual properties due to unconscious inference • Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) – visual inferences came God

11. A Brief History • Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) – described vision as a process of unconscious inference • David Marr (1946-1981) – compared visual construction to information processing in computers • Ernst Hans Gombrich(1909) – unconscious and automatic processes are “projections”, while those that are more labored for are “inference” or “knowledge”

12. Fundamental Problem of Vision • The image at the eye has countless interpretations • How can we know that we all see the same thing? • Innate rules which grant visual mastery and lead to consensus in the visual constructions despite ambiguity • Everyone constructs the same vision (with or without the same interpretation) • The rules, which work quickly and effectively are the key