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Constant Enough: On The Kinds Of Perceptual Constancy Worth Having, Frank H. Durgin, Anna Jane Ruff , '09, Robert Calverley Russell , '08

Psychology Faculty Works

This chapter argues that whereas perceptual experience is underconstant in one sense, it is virtually constant insofar as it is functionally stable and predictable. The possibility of distinguishing perception and cognition is explored in experiments on the perception of surface orientation. These experiments are related to the study of self-motion perception and space perception. An experiment comparing monocular and binocular perception of hills revealed perceptual differences, between-subjects, that were masked in within-subject comparisons by metacognitive strategies. A second experiment found that participants wearing heavy backpacks gave (cognitively) elevated slope estimates only because of experimental demands not physical ones. Perceptual experience …