Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)
Over the past thirty years, Zenon Pylyshyn has played a leading role in developing theories of high-level visual cognition. In this book, he brings together his long-standing interests in the modularity of visual processing, the relations between visual attention, spatial indexing, and 'seeing', and the relationship between imagery and vision. The work not only summarizes his influential views, but also raises important questions for future research. It will be of considerable relevance to all interested in high-level vision, from psychologists to computer scientists and philosophers.(Glyn Humphreys, University of Birmingham)Pylyshyn's book is to be commended as a thorough and persuasive defense of the information-processing approach to vision and visualizing. It should be essential reading for psychologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers.(Paul CoatesMetapsychology)Seeing and Visualizingoffers a persuasive account of why visual perception and visual imagery do not depend on internal pictorial representations, and puts forward the deeply counterintuitive notion that the machinery of visual thinking does not use mental pictures at all. Pylyshyn's masterful defense of this idea is a 'must-read' not only for committed Fodorians but also for those who believe that mental representations resemble the things they depict. The book is challenging and provocative -- and even occasionally infuriating -- but always thoughtful and immensely readable. I recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered about how we see and visualize the world.(Mel Goodale, Canada Research Professor in Visual Neuroscience, University of Western Ontario)