Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionWhat's next? New evidence for prediction in human vision
Section snippets
What's next? New evidence for prediction in human vision
The next time you hear familiar footsteps outside your door, pay close attention to your visual experience when the person appears. If your prediction is confirmed, you will fluently identify the person and begin your social exchange. But if those footsteps belong to an unexpected person, albeit one familiar to you, you will do a double-take. Your visual identification will be momentarily frozen by the mismatch between your auditory-based prediction and the person's appearance.
Analogs of these
Recent developments in the neurobiology of predictive vision
Despite this ambiguity, there is renewed interest in perceptual prediction, which has been driven by studies of brain imaging in humans and electrophysiology in animals. These studies reveal that the time course of brain activation does not follow the conventional anatomical hierarchy 33, 34. Some higher-level cortical areas receive signals from the eyes at the same time, or even before, some so-called lower-order areas. Other studies show that communication between two brain areas is generally
Unexpected finding offers new evidence of prediction in vision
The recent finding of a unique pattern of search behavior in humans promises a way, from within this predictive-brain framework, to study implicit visual prediction. The main result is that we can resume a previously interrupted search much faster than we can start a new search [49]. The evidence for prediction – versus merely fluent access to memory – is based on two crucial findings. The first finding is the sheer speed with which a search can resume after an interruption. Correct responses
Concluding remarks: the future of implicit perceptual predictions
We have interpreted the finding that humans can resume an interrupted search much faster than they can start a new search 49, 52, 53, 54 as evidence that implicit predictions are formed in the course of everyday visual behavior, such as finding your keys on a cluttered desk. But questions remain (Box 5), and there is much work to be done, both to confirm that the rapid resumption of a search really involves forward-acting perceptual predictions and then to study the nature of those predictions
Acknowledgements
The preparation of this article was supported by a Discovery Grant (NSERC Canada) and a UBC Study Leave (2007–08) to J.T.E. The authors are grateful to Jeremy Wolfe for critical comments in review and especially for suggesting the importance of distinguishing between theories based on prediction versus the simple accumulation of evidence.
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