Oculomotor Systems and Perception.

摘要

Oculomotor Systems and Perception. Sheldon M. Ebenholtz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pages: 212. Price: $59.95. ISBN 0-521-80459-0. With this small, book Professor Sheldon Ebenholtz has made a fundamental contribution to our understanding and further investigation of visual perception. Professor Ebenholtz intended Oculomotor Systems and Perception to serve as “a complement to standard texts on visual perception” by providing basic information about oculomotor processes and their influence on perception. In this role, his book fills an important gap in our education of future investigators because none of the current textbooks on vision do justice to the pervasive influences of oculomotor systems. Rather, the standard approach seems satisfied to treat perception as though it involves primarily (or exclusively) sensory and cognitive processes. Ebenholtz’s book teaches us why such an approach is, at best, incomplete, and most likely seriously misleading. But the value of his book goes well beyond its use for teaching perception. Advanced scholars will find here an integrative review of the empirical literature on the role of oculomotor systems in perception and the theoretical implications of this fundamental issue. This information is extremely important as a context for future investigations, both for studies of visual perception of location, orientation, and motion and, more generally, the complex interrelationships of perception and action systems. Oculomotor Systems and Perception is organized into five chapters (plus an appendix) arranged to progress logically from the general problem of seeing where things are in the world around us (Chapter I) through basic information about physiological optics (Chapter II) and oculomotor systems (Chapter III) toward a sophisticated treatment of empirical evidence for the role of oculomotor processes in perception (Chapter IV) and, finally, leading to plausible theoretical conceptions of the underlying mechanisms (Chapter V). Thus, the early chapters prepare a reader, who is not yet familiar with how our eyes perform the most frequent and precise movements of the human body, for the more challenging issues of how eye movements actually inform perceptual processes. That done, the reader is ready to appreciate Ebenholtz’s review of the vast body of evidence, which has established that the simple act of looking has both direct effects on our perception of where an object is and simultaneous indirect effects on our perception of the object’s size, depth, and speed of movements (Chapter IV). At the heart of this review is the lesson that one cannot explain the most basic phenomena of visual experience without a fuller understanding of how sensory information from the retinal images is integrated with the organization and control of multiple eye movement systems. This lesson merits the consideration of accomplished scholars as well as younger students of vision, so Chapter IV could be a good entry point for the advanced reader. The final chapter (V) charts a course toward understanding perception in terms of complex neural networks, which coordinate visual sensory information with vestibular and postural control as well as eye movement systems. All serious students of vision, young and old alike, need the read and think hard about this because it is basic to problems faced by investigators in psychology, neurophysiology, biomedical engineering, human factors, and robotics, as well as optometry and ophthalmology. The book is well illustrated throughout, with most illustrations accompanied by a lengthy caption. Indeed, the captions are so informative that they could almost serve as a “quick read” of the book. There are also interesting acknowledgments to the history of vision science, most notably in Chapter V, which highlights of the pioneering work of Ernst Mach and Eric von Holst. The Appendix will be interesting for younger students because it summarizes the role of oculomoto