The laws of physics and mathematics describe the world we live in as internally consistent. As these rules provide a very effective description, and our interaction with the world is also very effective, it seems self-evident that our perception follows these laws. As a result, when trying to explain imperfections in perception, we tend to impose consistency and introduce concepts such as deformations of visual space. In this review, we provide numerous examples that show that in many situations we perceive related attributes to have inconsistent values. We discuss how our tendency to assume consistency leads to erroneous conclusions on how we process sensory information. We propose that perception is not about creating a consistent internal representation of the outside world, but about answering specific questions about the outside world. As the information used to answer a question is specific for that question, this naturally leads to inconsistencies in perception and to an apparent dissociation between some perceptual judgments and related actions.

中文翻译：

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追求最佳答案的代价：不一致的看法

物理学和数学定律将我们生活的世界描述为内在一致的。由于这些规则提供了非常有效的描述，而且我们与世界的互动也非常有效，因此我们的感知遵循这些规律似乎是不言而喻的。因此，当试图解释感知中的缺陷时，我们倾向于强加一致性并引入视觉空间变形等概念。在本次审查中，我们提供了大量示例，这些示例表明在许多情况下我们认为相关属性具有不一致的值。我们讨论了我们假设一致性的倾向如何导致关于我们如何处理感官信息的错误结论。我们提出，感知不是要创造一个一致的外部世界内部表征，而是要回答关于外部世界的具体问题。