Refereed full papers (journals, book chapters, international conferences)

1966

The familiar perceptual constancies of image location in the field of view, image orientation, size constancy, shape constancy, binocular distortion, and motion, have their natural mathematical expression in terms of Lie groups of transformations over the visual manifold. If Lie's three fundamental theorems are to be satisfied, three additional perceptual invariances must also be present: time, efferent binocularity, and what apparently constitutes sort of circulating memory in space-time. This Lie algebra of visual perception admits ready explanations for the following visual phenomena: the development sequence of infant vision; orthogonal after-images; after-effects of seen movement; the spiral after-effect and the spiral images sometimes evoked under flicker; reading reversals; and the visual analogue of the Fitzgerald contraction. The theory also predicts certain new complementary (orthogonal) after-images, the existence of which has been verified experimentally.