Perceptual Psychologist Stephen Palmer To Speak At UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Award-winning perceptual psychologist Stephen E. Palmer, whose inquiry into the nature of visual perception has aroused interest across many disciplines, will present the 2000 UB Distinguished Speaker Lecture in Cognitive Science from 3:30-5 p.m. April 4 in 20 Knox Hall on the UB North Campus.

The talk, sponsored by the UB Center for Cognitive Science, will be free of charge and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by the UB Department of Psychology, Department of English, English Language Institute and School of Information Studies.

Professor of psychology and director of the Visual Studies Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, Palmer will discuss such issues as how color categories develop across cultures and whether a biologically based explanation of color experience is possible.

He also will address material published in his recent textbook, "Vision Science: From Photons to Phenomenology." In it, Palmer explores a number of issues in the emerging field of vision science, and in particular its fundamental question: how we are able, so quickly and effortlessly, to perceive meaningful, coherent, three-dimensional objects from the incomplete, two-dimensional pattern of light that enters our eyes.

Palmer says he began his book with this question because the first step in any scientific enterprise is asking questions about things that normally are taken for granted.

"Most of us take our ability to see the world around us completely for granted," he writes. "There is no great mystery to how we do it -- we just open our eyes and look! And yet when viewed critically as an ability that must be explained, visual perception is so incredibly complex that it seems almost a miracle we are able to do it at all."

Among Palmer's other influential books are "Of Color and Consciousness," "Rethinking Perceptual Organization," "Reference Frames in the Perception of Spatial Structure" and "Modern Theories of Gestalt Perception." He is the former editor of the journal Cognitive Psychology and is editor of the Bradford Books/MIT Press series in cognitive psychology.