Sculptures of Unusual Perceptions

Abstract

Raleigh-With the investigations of visual perception by the experimental psychologists of this century the purely philosophic assumptions regarding perception that had clouded and confounded prior research were largely removed. Swinging between hypothetical positions of perception as predominantly innate to the structure of the organism to perception as predominantly learned, contemporary research appears to settle on a rough compromise, working on a supposition that some aspects of perception are learned, others structurally given. Still, the major question is the relationship between the two. The phenomenon of perceptual constancy, for example, is not clearly explained since the relationship of memory, inference and cognitive judgment to the mechanics of the visual system is insufficiently known. Artists concerned with perceptual information have generally not found psychological studies useful because researchers still concentrate on the simplest forms of perceptionmost of these a traditional common-place in artistic illusions. Of greater interest in its broader implications has been the ecological orientation provided