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Will understanding vision require a wholly empirical paradigm?
Dale Purves1, Yaniv Morgenstern2, William T Wojtach3
1Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke University , Durham, NC, USA ; Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore , Singapore, Singapore ; Department of Neurobiology, Duke University , Durham, NC, USA.
Frontiers in Psychology
|August 19, 2015
Summary
Vision does not recover world features but empirically assigns perceptual qualities. This strategy, based on survival and reproductive success, associates stimulus patterns with useful responses.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Vision Science
Background:
- The prevailing view suggests the visual system reconstructs the external world from retinal images.
- This model fails to explain discrepancies between perception and physical reality or successful navigation.
- An alternative framework is proposed to address these limitations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To describe an alternative strategy for vision.
- To present evidence supporting this empirical approach to visual perception.
Main Methods:
- The study reviews existing electrophysiological and anatomical data.
- It contrasts the feature-recovery model with an empirical association strategy.
- Evidence is drawn from principles of survival and reproductive success.
Main Results:
- Visual perception is proposed to be an empirical assignment of qualities to stimuli.
- This assignment is based on frequently associated stimulus patterns and adaptive responses.
- This strategy is linked to evolutionary success.
Conclusions:
- Vision operates not by recovering objective features but by creating empirically useful perceptions.
- This alternative model offers a more robust explanation for visual perception and behavior.
- The evolutionary basis of vision is highlighted as a key driver of perceptual assignment.
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