What Pictures Tell Us about Surface Perception

Dhanraj Vishwanath
Department of Psychology
Rochester Institute of Technology

Pictures are a special class of visual surfaces that rarely occur in
nature, yet the unusual effects observed in pictorial perception provide
clues to the nature of surface perception in general. Some recent
results (Vishwanath, Girshick, Banks, 2005) suggest that phenomena in
pictorial space perception often though to be disparate (such as
perceptual invariance to viewing position, wide angle distortions, and
anamorphic effects) are consistent with established optimal-inference
models for the recovery of metric properties of visual surfaces. Yet the
fact that we even obtain a percept of 3D space in pictures, given the
availability of robust cues to a planar 2D surface, is highly puzzling
within such models of surface perception. This puzzle indicates that
there may be underlying representational constraints (beyond generic
priors) that force certain perceptual structures.