"Sight can be so effortless, so useful, and so entertaining - the average human can distinguish several million colors; a falcon can see a fencepost from three thousand yards - that we never stop to think about how complex a process it is and how easily it can fail us. We never have as clear and complete a picture of the world around us as we think we do. The gaps between what our eyes take in and what is in our mind's eye provide the unifying theme...

In this introduction to modern vision science, the author uses visual illusions to explore how the brain sees the world. Understanding vision, he argues, is not simply a question of knowing which neurons respond to particular visual features, but also requires a computational theory of vision. He draws together results from David Marr's computational framework, Barlow's efficient coding hypothesis, Bayesian inference, Shannon's information theory,...

Four animal friends notice that the size of distant objects seems to change depending on the location and movement of the viewer.

Written by an established author, Attention, Perception and Memory: An Integrated Introduction explains clearly the evolution and meaning of key terminology and assumptions and puts the different approaches to this field in context.