fuzzyfelt said:
Removed from the topic, but notable also is that looking at the eyes of people outside his immediate family can cause anxiety. As well, integrating sound with vision can also be problematic, e.g. preferring to close eyes to listen to speech.
Jackson, I suppose you didn't get a lot of replies because people felt they did not have much to contribute, or simply missed your thread (as I did, for one.)
Fuzzyfelt has given you some very thoughtful and thought-provoking material. Give it the deepest attention you can manage; it has lots of implications.
I am no perception psychologist, but from the information theoretic point of view, our sensory view of the world necessarily lacks many dimensions, with the result that much of what we see we are reduced to interpreting on a commonsense basis, filtering out perceptions of unlikely effects, and adjusting perceptions to accommodate sensory distortions that are normally misleading. In doing so we save ourselves a great deal of confusion and effort, but expose ourselves to misleading, deliberate distortion (as occurs in visual illusions for example.)
Have a look at the art of M. C. Escher. Read at least the first half of "The Island of the Colour-Blind" by Oliver Sacks, and "The Blank Slate" and "How the Mind Works" by Stephen Pinker. Surf the web for visual illusions.
Perception is too wide and subtle a field to take lightly, or I would go more deeply than my competence would justify into such subjects as camouflage for one. However, one field that you might find worth trying to find material on, is the perceptions of technologically and graphically naive subjects such as tribalised peoples (not that they don't have their own technology and graphics, but that is not what I mean!)
In the South African mining industry thousands of such people have been employed in the mines for over a century, and their personnel departments have accumulated whole fields of experience in training their recruits. Using first-world graphic techniques and conventions for communication simply didn't work. For example, a safety poster showed a normal perspective drawing of a worker turning round while carrying a ladder on his shoulder and accidentally hitting a colleague with the hind end. They asked some workers to interpret the picture and got such responses as "The big man (the one carrying the ladder, nearer in perspective, and correspondingly objectively larger) is angry with the little man, so he hits him with the ladder." What worked better was the use of two-dimensional silhouette representation. It cut out a lot of information, but dispensed with the need to have mastered our first-world conventions.
Remember, conventions enable us to imply extra information by making logically unwarranted assumptions about missing information. Our self-centred physiological view of the world similarly forces us to make analogous assumptions about what we see and hear.
One of the stock figures of South African superstition is the tokoloshe, a small, but powerful and if not actually malicious, at least easily-angered spirit. For safety from him at night, the traditional precaution is to put your bed onto bricks. (At least it should help for fleas!) Like the King of Id, tokoloshe is touchy about his stature. If you happen to meet him he asks you: "Where am I?" The prudent answer is something like "You are far, faaarrr away, great Tokoloshe!" The implication is that the only reason he looks small is that he is in the distance.
Asked to draw a picture of four-legged animals, such people might draw them as if spread-eagled on the ground. Whether this is because that is how they commonly see them, or whether they are trying to get everything possible into the picture, Picassolike, don't ask
me!
Note that people extracted from exactly the same communities, but that have grown up in cities and been to school show no generic abnormalities of such types that I ever have heard of or experienced.
But as you can tell, though I respect the field of study, I know practically nothing about it. I can tell however that it is full of pitfalls for the unwary.
Go well,
Jon
Cheers,
