[music] Greetings, dear students My name is Valeria Karpinskaya, I am an associate professor at the Saint-Petersburg State University. Today my colleagues and I would like to present a course dedicated to visual perception and optical illusions. Today’s lecture serves as an introduction, and we are going to start it with the definition of visual perception. So, what is visual perception? This question cannot be answered without first answering the question “What is perception in general?” In turn, it is difficult to answer what perception is without having a concept or a useful theory of how our mind works and why we perceive the world around us the way we do. It is important to appreciate that there are a lot of different views on what the mind is and how it works. These views sometimes significantly contradict each other. None of them is capable of explaining the whole scope of the mind’s capacities. Thus, there is still no consensus as to what the mind or consciousness is, and no universally accepted definition of these familiar yet enigmatic terms. In psychology, just as in any other scientific discipline, to describe a phenomenon one needs to choose a theoretical paradigm and to follow a clear research course. This is the only way one might get a chance to come closer to solving the mysteries of nature. I would like to start with discussing two points that are key to understanding this course. First of all, perception is something that has to do with mind, and I am deliberately not defining whether I mean perception as a process, a result or an action. What’s important is that the nature of perception is psychological, not physiological. This course discusses psychological mechanisms of visual perception. Of course, we will devote some time to discussing the physiology of vision. However, the basic premise of this course is that physiological processes, despite playing an important role in the perception of the world around us, cannot by themselves be the key to understanding how either perception or, in general, mind and consciousness work. Secondly, a precise definition of perception as a process, a phenomenon or a result is meaningless for the purposes of this course. The division of different psychological processes that you can find in psychological textbooks is largely artificial and mainly dictated by tradition rather than any clear idea on the structure of the human psyche. In psychology, questions of perception, memory and reasoning are often discussed separately. Thus, it may seem that, for example, memory, reasoning, attention and perception function according to their own separate mechanisms that cannot be applied to other processes. The defining feature of this course is that it doesn't only discuss the phenomena and functional principles that characterise perception. Our position is that perception and its phenomena should be studied within the context of general principles that govern the functioning of the mind and consciousness. Studying perception can help us better understand how the mind and consciousness in general are organised. Knowing the operating principles of the mind and consciousness, in turn, helps us discover the mechanisms of perception. We will constantly return to these two points, because we are going to discuss not only the phenomena of visual perception, but also experimental studies and theoretical explanations of the phenomena that we are going to deal with.
