Scene Perception: What We Can Learn from Visual Integration and Change Detection

Much of perception does not require that information be preserved from one view to the next. This chapter's review of the visual-integration and change-detection literature suggests that precise and complete visual representations may be unnecessary for the experience of a stable, continuous visual world. Instead, the experience of stability is driven by precise representations of the information needed to guide action, accompanied by an assumption that the properties of objects in the world are unlikely to change across views. Of course, more sensitive measures might reveal the existence of complete, precise representations of all aspects of the visual world, but such detailed representations are not needed to explain the experience of an unchanging world from one view to the next.