Channel surfing in the visual brain

Paul T. Sowden, Philippe G. Schyns
2006 Trends in Cognitive Sciences  
Vision provides us with an ever-changing neural representation of the world from which we must extract stable object categorisations. We argue that visual analysis involves a fundamental interaction between the observer's top-down categorisation goals and the incoming stimulation. Specifically, we discuss the information available for categorisation from an analysis of different spatial scales by a bank of flexible, interacting spatial-frequency (SF) channels. We contend that these channels'
more » ... ivity is not simply determined "bottom-up" by the stimulus. Instead, we argue that following perceptual learning a specification of the diagnostic, object-based, SF information dynamically influences the "top-down" processing of retina-based SF information by these channels. Our analysis of SF processing provides a case study that emphasises the continuity between higher-level cognition and lower-level perception.
doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.10.007 pmid:17071128 fatcat:bwx66kgotfdtrjaidickyvgvie