“…First, as discussed above, it only applies to the processing stage probed by the manipulations investigated here, which we have provisionally described as the segmented representation of the scene [ 16 , 22 , 23 ]; second, it relates to perception, not to the underlying anatomy or physiology: it is conceivable that the neural implementation may involve a default network of early visual areas [ 53 , 68 , 88 , 97 , 98 ] communicating in a fashion that may be characterized as feedback [ 99 , 100 ], although on a faster timescale than typically associated with top-down control [ 63 , 88 , 101 , 102 ]. Our results demonstrate that the visual process of reconstructing meaningful boundaries from natural scenes immediately engages such integrated extraction/segmentation perceptual module [ 29 , 53 , 68 , 88 , 92 , 101 , 103 ], the operation of which is not dependent upon attentional deployment [ 10 , 104 , 105 ] ( Fig 2G ), relies on various statistical properties of the scene ( Fig 4 ), extends over large spatial scales [ 76 , 98 ] ( Fig 6A–6G and S2D Fig ), resides within occipital cortex [ 85 ] ( Fig 7G ), and retunes its machinery to hone into the expected signal without changing its intrinsic variability [ 13 , 54 , 69 , 73 ] ( Fig 8B ). It is feasible to construct a computational support for this integrated architecture based around plausible [ 11 ] and primarily feedforward (i.e., fast) neural networks [ 106 ] ( Fig 9C–9E ).…”