VISION: T H E EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF
VISUAL BEHAVIOR
DAVID INGLE
I. Introduction
. . . . . . . . . . .
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11. Relative Discrimination Weaknesses
. . . . . . 61
111. Configurational Properties of Shapes
. . . . . . 64
IV. Perceptual Equivalence and Change in Spatial Position
. . 68
V. Selective Attention . . . . . . . . . .
72
VI. Toward a Unified Outlook on Visual Behavior
. . . . 74
References
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
I. INTRODUCTION
This chapter reviews some analytical studies of fish visual behavior,
laying the chief emphasis upon discrimination abilities demonstrated in
the laboratory. Since many fishes depend heavily upon vision to guide
their countless daily decisions, a complete review would ramble far and
wide without providing a good account of our present knowledge concerning underlying visual mechanisms. Therefore, those studies were
selected that seem most useful in analyzing fundamental visual processes
-studies that seem most heuristic for a future liason between psychologists and those biologists who probe the visual system with scalpels and
electrodes. This restriction in subject matter is not entirely arbitrary, since
the best behavioral analyses have often been performed by those workers
who have hoped to dissect visual behavior into manageable component
processes.
Most of the older European studies of fish vision are regretably
ignored in this chapter. With a few exceptions, these workers did not use
enough subjects or a rigorous enough experimental design to allow firm
conclusions. Their aim was apparently to find in the fish kinds of visual
behavior that we more readily attribute to higher vertebrates: visual
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