Читать книгу The Form Within - Karl H Pribram - Страница 75

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, immediately adjacent to—or in some systems even overlapping— the primary sensory receiving areas of the brain, are brain areas that produce movement of the sensing elements when electrically excited. Adjacent to and to some extent overlapping this movement-producing cortex are areas that are involved in making possible consistent perceptions despite movement. My colleagues and I, as well as other investigators, have shown these areas to be involved in perceiving the size and color as well as the form of objects as consistent (called “size, color and object constancy” in experimental psychology.)

In our experiments we trained monkeys to respond to the smaller of two objects irrespective of how far they were placed along an alley. The sides of the alley were painted with horizontal stripes to accentuate its perceived distance. The monkeys had to pull in the smaller of the objects in order to be able to open a box containing a peanut. After the monkeys achieved 90% plus, I removed the cortex surrounding the primary visual receiving area (which included the visuomotor area). The performance of the monkeys who had the cortical removals fell to chance and never improved over the next 1000 trials. They always “saw” the distant object as smaller. They could not correct for size constancy on the basis of the distance cues present in the alley.