Abstract

The structure in light is created by its interaction with surfaces and materials that fill our environment. We experience our environment as a 3D layout of surfaces and materials that possess qualities such as color, lightness, opacity, gloss, and shape. One of the most fundamental problems in vision science involves understanding how the visual system separates these different sources of image structure and generates our experience of these different surfaces and material attributes. In this chapter, I discuss the theoretical issues that arise in attempts to craft solutions to these problems, and describe a body of empirical data that bears on the relationship between the dimensions of perceptual experience and the physical sources of variability generated by the world.