Adaptation, High-Level Vision, and the Phenomenology of Perception

摘要

To what extent do we have shared or unique visual experiences? This paper examines how the answer to this question is constrained by known processes of visual adaptation. Adaptation constantly recalibrates visual sensitivity so that our vision is matched to the stimuli that we are currently exposed to. These processes normalize perception not only to low-level features in the image, but to high-level, biologically relevant properties of the visual world. They can therefore strongly impact many natural perceptual judgments. To the extent that observers are exposed to and thus adapted by a different environment, their vision will be normalized in different ways and their subjective visual experience will differ. These differences are illustrated by considering how adaptation can influence human face perception. To the extent that observers are exposed and adapted to common properties in the environment, their vision will be adjusted toward common states, and in this respect they will have a common visual experience. This is illustrated by reviewing the effects of adaptation on the perception of image blur. In either case, it is the similarities or differences in the stimuli -and not the intrinsic similarities or differences in the observers - which determine the relative states of adaptation. Thus at least some aspects of our private internal experience are controlled by external factors that are accessible to objective measurement.