Conscious Seeing and Invariant Recognition

Abstract

This chapter explains fundamental differences between seeing and recognition, notably how and why our brains use conscious seeing to control actions like looking and reaching, while we learn both view-, size-, and view-specific object recognition categories, and view-, size-, and position-invariant object recognition categories, as our eyes search a scene during active vision. The dorsal Where cortical stream and the ventral What cortical stream interact to regulate invariant category learning by solving the View-to-Object Binding problem whereby inferotemporal, or IT, cortex associates only views of a single object with its learned invariant category. Feature-category resonances between V2/V4 and IT support category recognition. Symptoms of visual agnosia emerge when IT is lesioned. V2 and V4 interact to enable amodal completion of partially occluded objects behind their occluders, without requiring that all occluders look transparent. V4 represents the unoccluded surfaces of opaque objects and triggers a surface-shroud resonance with posterial parietal cortex, or PPC, that renders surfaces consciously visible, and enables them to control actions. Clinical symptoms of visual neglect emerge when PPC is lesioned. A unified explanation is given of data about visual crowding, situational awareness, change blindness, motion-induced blindness, visual search, perceptual stability, and target swapping. Although visual boundaries and surfaces obey computationally complementary laws, feedback between boundaries and surfaces ensure their consistency and initiate figure-ground separation, while commanding our eyes to foveate sequences of salient features on object surfaces, and thereby triggering invariant category learning. What-to-Where stream interactions enable Where’s Waldo searches for desired objects in cluttered scenes.