Why we see things the way we do: evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision

Abstract

Many otherwise puzzling aspects of the way we see brightness, colour, orientation and motion can be understood in wholly empirical terms. The evidence reviewed here leads to the conclusion that visual percepts are based on patterns of re£ex neural activity shaped entirely by the past success (or failure) of visually guided behaviour in response to the same or a similar retinal stimulus. As a result, the images we see accord with what the sources of the stimuli have typically turned out to be, rather than with the physical properties of the relevant objects. If vision does indeed depend upon this operational strategy to generate optimally useful perceptions of inevitably ambiguous stimuli, then the underlying neurobiological processes will eventually need to be understood within this conceptual framework.

Coexistence of binocular integration and suppression determined by surface border information

“…Interestingly, for binocular surface perception, the visual system can bind selective features from the two retinal images based on projection geometry constraints. This reinforces the notion that the visual system can solve the feature-binding problem by relying on perceptual rules that are derived from its past experiences of interacting with the ecological environment (40)(41)(42). Stimuli.…”

Failures in Learning-Dependent Predictive Perception as the Key Cognitive Vulnerability to Psychosis in Schizophrenia

“…As a situation becomes more familiar, the representations of a given level of analysis are shifted to lower cortical areas, freeing higher areas for the detection of high-level patterns. The correct identification of objects, sensations, and processes in the environment is thus based upon probabilistic prediction determined by the accumulation of memories of how the perceptual world is organized and how it operates (Hawkins and Blakeslee, 2004;Purves et al, 2001).…”

A probabilistic explanation of brightness scaling

“…The possibility that we examine here is that the relationship between luminance and the resulting perceptions of lightness or brightness reflects a probabilistic strategy of visual processing demanded by the inherent ambiguity of visual stimuli. In these terms, the perceived intensity of any luminant stimulus is determined by the probability distribution of the possible underlying sources, or, more precisely, by the probable contributions of reflectance (R) and illumination (I) to the luminances experienced in the past (11). The amount of light associated with any part of a scene-that is, its local luminance-is typically the product of the I of that region and the R efficiency function(s) of the relevant object surfaces (12).…”