Past experience and meaning affect object detection: A hierarchical Bayesian approach

Prior Experience Alters the Appearance of Blurry Object Borders

“…Consequently, the explanation in terms of the integration of object memory and current stimulation better fits the data than an explanation in terms of attention. Previous studies have shown that borders of stimuli such as those tested here can access memory representations of familiar objects very early in processing and serve as priors for figural assignment 4,5,36,[38][39][40][41][42] . The present experiments show that the influence of past experiences transcends the effect seen on figural assignment and extends to the subjective appearance of stimuli.…”

“…The familiar stimulus was the Test on half the trials; the novel stimulus was the Test on the other half the trials. There were 16 trials for each combination of stimulus condition (familiar vs novel Test stimulus), priming condition (identity, unrelated, control), and Test stimulus blur level (3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11). All trial types were randomly intermixed.…”

“…Studies of vision demonstrate that bottom-up processes are insufficient for understanding how the brain constructs our percept of the external world; instead, higher factors such as attention, expectation, and memory influence visual processing [1][2][3][4][5] . While attention facilitates processing of visual stimuli by granting priority to the more relevant aspects of the scene, memory and expectation constrain possible interpretations of visual input and predict what is likely to occur in the sensory environment; all result in improved perceptual performance 3,[6][7][8] .…”

Prior Experience Alters the Appearance of Blurry Object Borders

“…Consequently, the explanation in terms of the integration of object memory and current stimulation better fits the data than an explanation in terms of attention. Previous studies have shown that borders of stimuli such as those tested here can access memory representations of familiar objects very early in processing and serve as priors for figural assignment 4–5, 33, 35–39 . The present experiments show that the influence of past experiences transcends the effect seen on figural assignment and extends to the subjective appearance of stimuli.…”

“…Studies of vision demonstrate that bottom-up processes are not sufficient for understanding how the brain constructs our percept of the external world; instead, they reveal that higher factors such as attention, expectation, and memory also influence visual processing 1–5 . While attention facilitates processing of visual stimuli by granting priority to the more relevant aspects of the scene, memory and expectation do so by constraining possible interpretations of visual input and predicting what is likely to occur in the sensory environment based on prior experience; all result in improved perceptual performance 3,6–8 .…”