Visual space

[4] Mathematicians, for example, deal with ordered structures, ensembles of elements for which rules of logico-deductive relationships hold, limited solely by being not self-contradictory.

One of Luneburg's major arguments is that, in accord with a common observation, the transformation involving hyperbolic space renders infinity into a dome (the sky).

visual space agnosia is a recognized neurological condition, and the many common distortions, called geometrical-optical illusions, are widely demonstrated but of minor consequence.

Its founder, Gustav Theodor Fechner defined the mission of the discipline of psychophysics as the functional relationship between the mental and material worlds—in this particular case, the visual and object spaces—but he acknowledged an intermediate step, which has since blossomed into the major enterprise of modern neuroscience.

In distinguishing between inner and outer psychophysics, Fechner recognized that a physical stimulus generates a percept by way of an effect on the organism's sensory and nervous systems.

Johannes Müller emphasized that what matters in a neural path is the connection it makes,[citation needed] and Hermann Lotze, from psychological considerations, enunciated the principle of local sign[clarify].

The orderly array of retinal locations is preserved in the passage from the retina to the brain, and provides what is aptly called a "retinotopic" mapping in the primary visual cortex.

Thus in the first instance brain activity retains the relative spatial ordering of the objects and lays the foundations for a neural substrate of visual space.

Right at the outset, visual signals are analyzed not only for their position, but also, separately in parallel channels, for many other attributes such as brightness, color, orientation, depth.

Though the details of the process by which the experience of visual space emerges remain opaque, a startling finding gives hope for future insights.

Neural units have been demonstrated in the brain structure called hippocampus that show activity only when the animal is in a specific place in its environment.

[10] Only on an astronomical scale are physical space and its contents interdependent, This major proposition of the general theory of relativity is of no concern in vision.

Looked at as a mathematical/geometrical problem, expanding a 2-dimensional object manifold into a 3-dimensional visual world is "ill-posed," i.e., not capable of a rational solution, but is accomplished quite effectively by the human observer.

Hence, the uncomplicated three-dimensional visual space of every-day experience is the product of many perceptual and cognitive layers superimposed on the physiological representation of the physical world of objects.