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Science 4 September 1992:
Vol. 257. no. 5075, pp. 1357 - 1363
DOI: 10.1126/science.1529336
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Articles

Science, Vol 257, Issue 5075, 1357-1363
Copyright © 1992 by American Association for the Advancement of Science

articles

Experiencing and perceiving visual surfaces

K Nakayama and S Shimojo

Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.

A theoretical framework is proposed to understand binocular visual surface perception based on the idea of a mobile observer sampling images from random vantage points in space. Application of the generic sampling principle indicates that the visual system acts as if it were viewing surface layouts from generic not accidental vantage points. Through the observer's experience of optical sampling, which can be characterized geometrically, the visual system makes associative connections between images and surfaces, passively internalizing the conditional probabilities of image sampling from surfaces. This in turn enables the visual system to determine which surface a given image most strongly indicates. Thus, visual surface perception can be considered as inverse ecological optics based on learning through ecological optics. As such, it is formally equivalent to a degenerate form of Bayesian inference where prior probabilities are neglected.


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