Prediction, context, and competition in visual recognition

Abstract

Perception is substantially facilitated by top-down influences, typically seen as predictions. Here, we outline that the process is competitive in nature, in that sensory input initially activates multiple possible interpretations, or perceptual hypotheses, of its causes. This raises the question of how the selection of the correct interpretation from among those multiple hypotheses is achieved. We first review previous findings in support of such a competitive nature of perceptual processing, and then propose which neural regions might provide a platform for rising and using expectations to resolve this competition. Specifically, we propose that it is the rapid extraction and top-down dissemination of a global context signal from the frontal cortices, particularly the orbitofrontal cortex, that affords the quick and reliable resolution of the initial competition among likely alternatives toward a singular percept.

Disentangling stimulus plausibility and contextual congruency: Electro-physiological evidence for differential cognitive dynamics

“…On a similar line of arguments, we believe that our results provide additional evidence in support of contextual matching models (e.g. Bar and Ullman, 1996;Bar, 2004;De Cesarei and Loftus, 2011;Mudrik et al, 2014;Trapp and Bar, 2015). Such models assume that an experience-based schematic prediction of a scene (and its context) is generated from its low spatial-frequency, and top-down control exerted upon this pre-activated schema to filter out irrelevant information.…”

How does information from low and high spatial frequencies interact during scene categorization?

“…Results from fMRI (Kauffmann, Bourgin, et al, 2015) further showed that the semantic interference effect involved the inferior frontal gyrus (including the orbitofrontal cortex) and the inferotemporal cortex, and was associated with greater functional connectivity between these two regions. Overall, results from these two studies supported the proactive model of visual recognition (Bar, 2003(Bar, , 2007Trapp & Bar, 2015). In that theoretical context, the semantic interference effect in frontal and inferotemporal areas was interpreted as reflecting erroneous predictions generated in the inferior frontal cortex based on LSF information of hybrids in the semantically dissimilar condition that led to impaired HSF scene categorization in the inferotemporal cortex, resulting in greater connectivity between these areas.…”

“…The semantic interference of LSF over HSF scene categorization was previously interpreted in the context of the proactive model of visual recognition proposed by Bar and colleagues (Bar, 2003(Bar, , 2007Bar et al, 2006;Kveraga, Boshyan, & Bar, 2007;Trapp & Bar, 2015). According to this model, fast processing of LSF information allows us to generate coarse predictions about the nature of the visual input in the orbitofrontal cortex.…”

“…LSF information would be extracted first, allowing a coarse parsing of the visual input, prior to the analysis of fine information contained in HSF. In this theoretical framework, it was also hypothesized that rapid LSF information may guide the subsequent processing of HSF (Bar, 2003;Kauffmann et al, 2014;Peyrin et al, 2010;Trapp & Bar, 2015).…”

Predictions penetrate perception: Converging insights from brain, behaviour and disorder

“…The convergence of sensory, emotional and contextual information is consistent with more information-rich prediction error signals being a most effective means of minimising global prediction error. The winning interpretation is then fed back to bias processing in earlier visual regions (Trapp & Bar, 2015). In the following section we consider contextual associations as one of the critical sources of information harnessed in ongoing visual processing.…”