The preceding analysis shows how wrong this viewpoint is. The
contrast between Leonardo's geometric expectations and our
experience is the very issue at hand, the issue we wish to
understand. No one has claimed that "the fact observers are not
consciously aware of distortions in virtual space" implies "that
the nature of virtual space is unregistered by the visual
system." On the contrary, most theoreticians of picture
perception (including Rosinski and Farber) believe that
observers are not aware of distortions in virtual space because
a part of the visual system (whose workings are unconscious)
registers both the nature of the virtual space and the
orientation of the surface of the picture, and corrects the
former in the light of the latter. Rosinski and Farber
oversimplifywhen they say that "to comment on whether a picture
seems distorted is to assess the correspondence between virtual
and environmental space." We have seen that evaluating whether a
picture seems distorted entails a far richer implicit cog