Journal #1 -- Chapter 14

For chapter 14, “The Perception Psychologists”, I’m going to focus on the concept of seeing movement. In the book it argues that vision without perception of movement is “valueless”, almost as if saying you may as well be blind. Perception of our own movement guides us in making our way through our environment—perception of objects coming towards us enables us to escape harm. Along with the perception of our hands and our bodies in general gives us information to control with whether its balancing or reaching out for an object to grab.

A case example in the book was a patient who experienced this loss of movement vision—her brain scans along with other tests showed that she suffered damage to a part of the cerebral cortex outside the primary visual receiving area that is known to be essential to awareness of movement.

When she would pour liquid into a cup it would appear frozen, as well as not knowing when to stop pouring since she could not see the rising of the liquid in the cup. People would also appear in rooms suddenly as she could not see them move or come in, and she couldn’t cross the street due to not being able to properly sense the speed of a car and if one was even coming towards her or not. This does show the value of movement perception and our ability to use it for different things—where something as simple as pouring water into a cup or crossing the street would be nearly impossible since movement cannot be detected. You would not know when to stop pouring, or when to cross the street safely.

The author even goes on to say that even without evidence, it is obvious how there is much importance to movement perception—and that we can judge from our own experiences. A lot of the research on movement perception deals with external variables and objective data, but not much about our internal processes. With how people experience things internally is just as, if not even more important than the external elements, due to it being called perception—it’s how we interpret and understand the information we receive through the senses; so it’s more than just the external factors.