Ref: 2533 LS/PB
24 October, 1996
Dear Dr. Lehar,
I enclose three referees' reports on your ms #2533 LS/PB. The general feeling is that your work is interesting and imaginative, but not mature for appearing in print. Therefore, I regret that I cannot accept your paper for publication in the special issue of Perception.
As you will see, two of the referees were in fact quite favorably impressed by your work, and showed their interest and appreciation by taking the time to read it carefully and offer thoughtful and detailed comments. The reason why your paper was ultimately considered inappropriate for publication, I am glad to notice, is not that your model is implausible or too radical or simply unconventional, but that in its present version it runs into a number of problems. In general, the referees shared the concern that at times you seem to be unaware of the existence of relevant literature, and indifferent to testing empirically the outcome of some of your predictions, even when that would take little time. To give you a straightforward example, your comment to Figure 21 is that the white right side of the target cube looks brighter than the white top because all the other cubes have a grey right side, indicating a dark illuminant from the right (and that your model predicts this perceptual outcome). One of the referees covered all cubes but the target one; the other drew a control figure in which all cubes had a white right side. Both remarked that the right side of the target cube still looked brighter than the top.
Some of the difficulties concern specific modelling solutions, whereas others are of a more philosophical nature. All problems can certainly be tackled and possibly solved. I believe that your paper presents a fresh and exciting approach to very complex issues, and that an ammended version of the model well deserves to be made available to the scientific community.
Thank you for submitting your work to 'Perception'.
Yours sincerely,
Lesley Sackett
for Paola Bressan
(signed in her absence).