The Roles of Image Schemas in Visual Perception

As recurring sensory-motor-affective experience patterns emerging from body-environment interactions, image schemas, cooperating with individual knowledge systems (IKS), play a significant role in visual perception. They function by way of interrelated input and output dimensions, allowing us to organize concrete visual representations and understand visual contents logically. By elaborating on how image schemas work in the visual perception of space, shapes, occluded objects and colors, it is shown that visual perception is not purely a seeing action of eyes, but instead is a dynamic, coherent and organized process realized through image schemas and interacting with such cognitive activities as understanding and association. Without image schemas, visual perception would be chaotic and meaningless.