Motion provides a powerful sensory cue for segmenting a visual scene into objects and inferring the causal relationships between objects. Fundamental mechanisms involved in this process are the integration and segmentation of local motion signals. However, the computations that govern whether local motion signals are perceptually integrated or segmented remain unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElucidating the neural basis of perceptual biases, such as those produced by visual illusions, can provide powerful insights into the neural mechanisms of perceptual inference. However, studying the subjective percepts of animals poses a fundamental challenge: unlike human participants, animals cannot be verbally instructed to report what they see, hear, or feel. Instead, they must be trained to perform a task for reward, and researchers must infer from their responses what the animal perceived.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVision is widely understood as an inference problem. However, two contrasting conceptions of the inference process have each been influential in research on biological vision as well as the engineering of machine vision. The first emphasizes bottom-up signal flow, describing vision as a largely feedforward, discriminative inference process that filters and transforms the visual information to remove irrelevant variation and represent behaviorally relevant information in a format suitable for downstream functions of cognition and behavioral control.
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