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What You See is Different from What I See: Species Differences in Visual Perception

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Primate Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior

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Abstract

Human perceptions of environmental events often differ from what they physically are. Suppose a man who has been talking to you at a distance of 1 m leaves you and walks away for a distance of 10 m. He should shrink to 1/10 of his real size because the retinal size of his image becomes 1/10 of what it was before. In fact, this idea never occurs to us; he looks almost as tall as he did at 1 m. This well-known phenomenon is called size constancy, and gives us an impressive example that what we see is different from what the real world is. In a sense, all perception is an illusion like this.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan

    Kazuo Fujita

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  1. Kazuo Fujita
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, 41 Kanrin, Inuyama, Aichi, 484-8506, Japan

    Tetsuro Matsuzawa (Professor, Director) (Professor, Director)

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Fujita, K. (2008). What You See is Different from What I See: Species Differences in Visual Perception. In: Matsuzawa, T. (eds) Primate Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-09423-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-09423-4_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo

  • Print ISBN: 978-4-431-09422-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-4-431-09423-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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