Publications by authors named "R Haefner"

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.

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Elucidating 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.

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Vision 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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Article Synopsis
  • The text discusses the challenge of defining motion based on different reference frames (like eye position or external surroundings) and how existing studies have produced mixed results on this topic.
  • A new hierarchical Bayesian model is introduced that translates retinal velocities into perceived velocities, aligning with the natural structure of how visual elements move together in related reference frames.
  • The model not only segments visual inputs but also supports predictions through experiments, helping to identify how individual observers perceive motion and providing a foundation for enhancing visual processing models using Gestalt principles.
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