Pylyshyn on Vision & Cognition: BBS Call for Commentators

[Stevan Harnad]

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on:

IS VISION CONTINUOUS WITH COGNITION?  THE CASE FOR COGNITIVE
IMPENETRABILITY OF VISUAL PERCEPTION

by Zenon Pylyshyn

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please send EMAIL to:

    bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk

      or write to:
    
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences
    Department of Psychology
    University of Southampton
    Highfield, Southampton
    SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/
    ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators
are eligible to become BBS Associates.

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection
with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the
instructions that follow after the abstract.

____________________________________________________________________

   IS VISION CONTINUOUS WITH COGNITION?  THE CASE FOR COGNITIVE
   IMPENETRABILITY OF VISUAL PERCEPTION

                Zenon Pylyshyn 
                Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science 
                Rutgers University 
                Psychology Addition, Busch Campus, 
                New Brunswick, NJ 08903 
                zenon at ruccs.rutgers.edu

    KEYWORDS: visual processing, modularity, cognitive
    penatrability, early vision context effects, top down
    processes, signal detection theory, attention expert
    perception, perceptual learning, knowledge-based vision, visual
    agnosia, categorical perception.

    ABSTRACT: Although the study of visual perception has made more
    progress in the past 40 years than any other area of cognitive
    science, there remain major disagreements as to how closely
    vision is tied to cognition. This paper sets out some of the
    arguments for both sides (arguments from computer vision,
    neuroscience, Psychophysics, perceptual learning and other areas
    of vision science) and defends the position that an important
    part of visual perception, corresponding to what some people
    have called early vision, is prohibited from accessing relevant
    expectations, knowledge and utilities in determining the
    function it computes - in other words it is cognitively
    impenetrable.  That part of vision is complex and involves
    top-down interactions that are internal to the early vision
    system.  Its function is to provide a structured representation
    of the 3-D surfaces of objects sufficient to serve as an index
    into memory, with somewhat different outputs being made
    available to other systems such as those dealing with motor
    control.  The paper also addresses certain conceptual and
    methodological issues raised by this claim, including the use of
    signal detection theory and event-related potentials to assess
    cognitive penetration of vision.

    A distinction is made among several stages in visual processing.
    These include, in addition to the inflexible early-vision
    stage, a pre-perceptual attention-allocation stage and a
    post-perceptual evaluation, selection, and inference stage which
    accesses long-term memory. These two stages provide the primary
    ways in which cognition can affect the outcome of visual
    perception.  The paper discusses arguments that have been
    presented in both computer vision and psychology showing that
    vision is "intelligent" and involves elements of "problem
    solving".  It is suggested that the cases of apparently
    intelligent interpretation that are sometimes cited in support
    of this claim do not show cognitive penetration, but rather they
    show that certain natural constraints on interpretation,
    concerned primarily with optical and geometrical properties of
    the world, have been compiled into the visual system.  The paper
    also examines a number of examples where instructions and
    "hints" are alleged to affect what is seen.  In each case it is
    concluded that the evidence is more readily assimilated to the
    view that when cognitive effects are found, they have a locus
    outside early vision, in such processes as the allocation of
    focal attention and identification of the stimulus.


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To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web or by anonymous ftp or gopher from the US or UK BBS Archive.
Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.

The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.pylyshyn.html
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.pylyshyn
    ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.pylyshyn
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either:
ftp ftp.princeton.edu
   or
ftp 128.112.128.1
   When you are asked for your login, type:
anonymous
   Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid:
   yourlogin at yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@")
cd /pub/harnad/BBS
   To show the available files, type:
ls
   Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example):
get bbs.pylyshyn
   When you have the file(s) you want, type:
quit