6.1: Introduction

Exogenous, sensory data helps us navigate through our daily lives. Our body’s specialized cells and tissues receive raw sensory information and translate it into signals that the mind and body can understand. The architecture of our brains is well-suited to handle, sort, and filter through the enormous amounts of sensory signals and noise that we encounter every day. One such sensory modality, vision, dominates phenomenological experience and has, in turn, dominated research on both bottom-up (or outside-in) and top-down (or inside-out) approaches to perception. The rich visual system literature spans domains and methodologies within psychology and related disciplines, many of which suggest a shared understanding of how the brain is able to integrate stored information, while continually processing new incoming stimuli. Though it may still be unclear, new computational approaches and computer-informed methodologies have shed light on an age-old debate. Namely, do our motivations and expectations inform conscious perception?

Research spanning decades has demonstrated the amazing capacity of the human visual system. Much of the brain’s posterior cortical structure is devoted in some way to processing visual information, with nearly half of the nonhuman primate neocortex being devoted to such processes (DiCarlo, Zoccolan, & Rust, 2012; Felleman & Van Essen, 1991). The dense visual network within the human brain is not contained within the occipital lobe, but recruits assistance from surrounding cortical areas. During visual processing, neural pathways work together to quickly discriminate between stimuli on a vast number of features; patterns, colors, motion, and many other structural features of our visual environments are registered on the retina and then integrated into ongoing neural and cognitive processing.

Despite a vast literature, complete mechanistic understanding of visual perception and recognition are still absent. Researchers continue to debate how exactly we interpret the world around us, and which methods are most appropriate for tackling that question. Some theorists have purposed a functionally impenetrable visual perception that is unadulterated by cognitive processes occurring elsewhere in the brain (Pylyshyn, 1999), while others disagree (see Friston, 2010), believing perception to be integrated with cognition similar to nearly all other functions within the brain. The present chapter will attempt to review this issue and relevant research findings guided by the predictive brain lens.

Specifically, the focus of the following chapter will be to examine how evidence of predictions inform visual recognition, as supported by neuroscientific and cognitive findings. How might social norms, our motivations and emotions, and informational assumptions influence what we see? Perceptual and recognition accuracy are fundamental to our visual experience, allowing us to interpret and make sense of the world around us. While research on the visual system touches many other important aspects to visual experiences (e.g., attention), those are not within the scope of the present review. Instead, I will focus on how neuroscientific, affective and motivational, and cognitive approaches can reveal important information about visual object recognition.