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Rating: 
Summary: excellent book
Review: A brillant book. It delivers not only the phenomenon, as many books about this subject do, but relevant and useful explanations why these phenomenons occur. Especially the insights about grouping and visual splitting in parts at concave cusps were most enlightening to me.
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Summary: Excellent Introduction and Reference Material
Review: Got this book out of our company library and found very easy to read, insightful and helpful in understanding the basics of human perception. Information on how we filter information is very helpful in designing a range of systems for humans to use. I've recommended this book to my peers at work and have bought a private copy for myself.
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Summary: Interesting, Useful Read for Graphics/VR Students
Review: I have no formal background in Biology, Cognitive Sciences, Anatomy or Psychology. I am interested in human vision, as it relates to Computer Graphics and Vitural Reality - some of my primary areas of interest. I picked up this book because it seemed to be about the "How's of visual processing" than the "Why's" of it. And the book seemed like a less time intensive read - important for someone who is not a full time researcher in the area of the book. It did not disappoint me.Modeling, and representation of most phenomena in a digital computer lag in precision compared to their originals in the physical world. They are pronouncedly more so with Computer Graphics, on which is founded the field of Virtual Reality. I believe that a researcher in VR should modify the kernel of his projects to rely on the ways of making virtual entities LOOK closest to their physical counterparts, rather than blindly simulate those entities with the closest precision possible. Thus, for a good VR universe, frequently, it is "fake the best" you can to recreate the virtual EXPERIENCE closest to the EXPRIRENCE of reality. "Experience" is the goal; not (always) the precision per se of the underlying simulation. That is where this books comes handy. Understanding how the "Visual Intelligence" works goes a long way in learning how to fake it. Chapters 3 ("The Invisible Surface That Glows"), 4 ("Spontaneous Morphing"), 5 ("The Day Color Drained Away") are particularly of interest to Graphics/VR students. I would have given a 5-star, if the author had made the "case histories" more readable and less verbose. In fact I skipped reading some of those!
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Summary: color Psychology
Review: Psychology, sensation & Perception, vision, color psycholog
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting data, absurd conclusions
Review: This author deserves credit for some interesting insights into particular perceptual phenomena, which correct some of the errors of the Gestalt theorists. But in these instances Hoffman is simply doing better Gestalt theorizing of his own. The philosophical conclusions he draws from the mere fact that retinal stimuli underdetermine perceptual effect are absurd -- and about 200 years out of date. Worse yet, it's hard to avoid the annoying sense that he's trying to flatter the reader by constantly reminding us that we ingeniously "create" our perceptual worlds. How else to explain such rich experiences occasioned by such impoverished stimuli? The Gestaltists long ago spotted the fallacy in this kind of reasoning, which simply takes it for granted that perceptions of external objects must be lined up directly with external stimuli at every step (the "constancy hypothesis"). But why assume that? Why not accept instead that we're very good at tracking features of (inexhaustibly) rich environments with relatively constrained sensory mechanisms? We don't create our perceptual worlds, that is, but follow its contours. At the same time, Hoffman's crudely flattering talk of "creation" is so poorly defined that one suspects it might in fact boil down to something trivial, for example that experience is a function of complex processes going on in the brain/organism. True, but hardly surprising, and certainly nothing to feel to smug about. So, enjoy the illuminating empirical observations and neat illustrations; forget the crass theorizing that comes with them.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introduction and Reference Material
Review: This book is a lot of fun to read, not only because it's really interesting but because you learn through experience while you read. The book is about how our minds interpret the visual information that our eyes see, and it includes many visual examples -- optical illusions, basically, that make you pay attention to how your mind is working while you take in the experience. I read the book because of an interest in graphic design, and it brings design concepts together with psychology and biology in a really involving way. It was just a pleasure to read from the beginning to almost the end. Another reviewer points out that the last chapter is a bit of a letdown, and that's true. It's kind of an "everything's relative and you construct your own reality" message that's obviously very important to the author for academic reasons but much less so to the audience. Still, it takes nothing away from the rest of this fascinating book.
Rating:
Summary: Overall, a great introduction to human vision
Review: To a degree, this book does for vision what Stephen Pinker's marvelous "The Language Instinct" did for language--explain the complexity of each of these problems, and the ways in which our minds address them. Hoffman is not as good a writer as Pinker, but most scientists are not, and this can be forgiven. The last chapter is rather annoyingly post-Modernist though, in its insistence the arbitrariness of the relationship between the "real world" and "what we see". This also reflects an underlying weakness of the book: its failure to adopt an evolutionary perspective that would help to explain not only HOW vision works, but also WHY it works that way. Nonetheless, within the scope of what it sets out to do (explain the basic rules by which our minds process the flat images on our retinas to produce vision, and also to illustrate how much in this field remains unknown or poorly understood), and given its brief length (barely 200 pages), the book succeeds admirably. Well worth reading.
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Summary: Visual process as active construction
Review: We construct our visual and perceptual experience of objects by touch, taste, smell, sound and sight -- or as cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman writes in VISUAL INTELLIGENCE, "... to experience is to construct, in each modality and without exception". Hoffman sets forth an extremely detailed and convincing explanation to support this assertion, and in the process takes us on a journey through the rules of visual intelligence. Many of us know that we construct each curve or surface we see, since the rods and cones inside our eyes use discrete pixel-like "dots" that can only approximate the images we perceive... but I didn't realize until I read this book how powerfully our visual interpretations affect our emotional responses.
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