Perception

Scientific American Library Series #8

by Irvin Rock

In this abundantly illustrated book, the noted psychologist Irvin Rock explores our perception of objects in the world, in art, and in visual illusions. With ingenious experiments devised by himself and other investigators, he explains the amazing riddle of how we manage to turn the ambiguous, everchanging, two-dimensional images that fall on the eye into the rich, constant, three-dimensional world as we see it.

Genres: Science, Biology

243 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Irvin Rock (1922–1995) was an American experimential psychologist who studied visual perception at the University of California at Berkeley.

His The Logic of Perception led to him being regarded as an excellent perception psychologist. Rock is notable in the field of psychology for his 1957 experiment where he tilted a square to make it look like a diamond and then tilted his test subjects and asked them what shape they saw. The experiment tested Rock's hypothesis that perceptual phenomena could be explained by higher-level mental processes instead of merely by automatic processes. When his test subjects continued to perceive the shape as a diamond after being tilted to view the shape as a square, Rock concluded that perception is an intelligent, higher-level mental process. This differed from previous conclusions by Gestalt psychologists that perception was not a higher-level process. Rock later wrote another important book on the field of inattentional blindness.