What information is being acquired during the period of Quiet Eye? Comment on Vickers

Sports and athletes’ highest performance offer a fascinating scenario to investigate perceptual-motor expertise. The remarkable work of Joan Vickers has captured this opportunity and built a valuable experimental paradigm. Our commentary emphasizes what information is being acquired during the period of Quiet Eye (QE), capable to produce successful performance. First, an extended notion of visual system that includes posture is presented. It is suggested that QE would represent a collective postural effort (resulting from movements of eyes, head, trunk, and whole body) to acquire the relevant information available in the optic flow. Second, the contribution of neural structures and functioning for vision and attention is discussed. Models of neural networks of attention and two visual systems are described with respect to QE and some questions about action parameters and motor programs are raised.

A Tale of Two Visual Systems: Invariant and Adaptive Visual Information Representations in the Primate Brain

Visual information processing contains two opposite needs. There is both a need to comprehend the richness of the visual world and a need to extract only pertinent visual information to guide thoughts and behavior at a given moment. I argue that these two aspects of visual processing are mediated by two complementary visual systems in the primate brain—specifically, the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) and the posterior parietal cortex (PPC). The role of OTC in visual processing has been documented extensively by decades of neuroscience research. I review here recent evidence from human imaging and monkey neurophysiology studies to highlight the role of PPC in adaptive visual processing. I first document the diverse array of visual representations found in PPC. I then describe the adaptive nature of visual representation in PPC by contrasting visual processing in OTC and PPC and by showing that visual representations in PPC largely originate from OTC.

Grasping and Pointing — Visual Conflict and Interference

There have been many debates of the two-visual-systems (whatvs. how or perceptionvs. action) hypothesis that was proposed by Goodale and his colleagues. Many researchers have provided a variety of evidence for or against the hypothesis. For instance, a study performed by Agliotiet al. offered good evidence for the two-visual-systems theory using the Ebbinghaus illusion, but some researchers who used other visual illusions failed to find consistent results. Therefore, we used a perceptual task of conflict or interference to test this hypothesis. If the conflict or interference in perception had an influence on the processing of perception alone and did not affect the processing of action, we could infer that the two visual systems are separated, and vice versa. In the current study, we carried out two experiments which employed the Stroop, Garner and SNARC paradigms and used graspable 3-D Arabic numerals. We aimed to find if the effects resulting from perceptual conflicts or interferences would affect participants’ grasping and pointing. The results showed that the interaction between Stroop and numeral order (ascending or descending, or SNARC) was significant, and the SNARC effect significantly affected action, but the main effects of Stroop and Garner interference were not significant. The results indicated that, to some degree, perceptual conflict affects action processing. The results did not provide evidence for two separate visual systems.

Visual Phenomenology

The main argument of the book is as follows: (1) The descriptive premise: The phenomenology of vision is best described as an ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. (2) The empirical premise: There are strong empirical reasons to model vision using the general form of anticipation and fulfillment. (AF) Conclusion: Visual perception is an ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. The book consists of three parts and an appendix. The first part of the book makes the case for premise (1) based on descriptive claims about the nature of first-person experience. The initial support for (1) in Chapter 2 is based on the fact that visual experience has the general features of being perspectival, temporal, and indeterminate. Chapter 3 includes an argument for (1) based on the possibility of surprise when appearances do not change as we expect, and Chapter 4 contains a discussion of the content of visual anticipations. The second part of the book focuses on empirical support. Chapter 5 covers a range of evidence from perceptual psychology that motivates premise (2). Chapter 6 turns to evidence from neuroscience, including recent work in predictive coding. The seventh chapter shows how evidence for the two-visual systems hypothesis can be re-interpreted in support of (2). The third part of the book turns to general methodological questions (Chapter 8) and the relationship between visual perception and social cognition (Chapter 9). The appendix addresses the ways in which Husserlian phenomenology relates to the main theme of the book.