Vision

Abstract

Available again, an influential book that offers a framework for understanding visual perception and considers fundamental questions about the brain and its functions. David Marr's posthumously published Vision (1982) influenced a generation of brain and cognitive scientists, inspiring many to enter the field. In Vision, Marr describes a general framework for understanding visual perception and touches on broader questions about how the brain and its functions can be studied and understood. Researchers from a range of brain and cognitive sciences have long valued Marr's creativity, intellectual power, and ability to integrate insights and data from neuroscience, psychology, and computation. This MIT Press edition makes Marr's influential work available to a new generation of students and scientists. In Marr's framework, the process of vision constructs a set of representations, starting from a description of the input image and culminating with a description of three-dimensional objects in the surrounding environment. A central theme, and one that has had far-reaching influence in both neuroscience and cognitive science, is the notion of different levels of analysis—in Marr's framework, the computational level, the algorithmic level, and the hardware implementation level. Now, thirty years later, the main problems that occupied Marr remain fundamental open problems in the study of perception. Vision provides inspiration for the continuing efforts to integrate knowledge from cognition and computation to understand vision and the brain.

Structured statistical models of inductive reasoning.

“…For example, each equation includes a sum which can range over many different feature vectors f , and we do not suggest that people explicitly consider a large set of possible feature vectors when ranking the strength of an argument. Although we do not attempt to provide a process model, a complete account of inductive reasoning should provide explanations at each of the three levels described by Marr (1982), and future work can explore how the computations in Equations 5 and 6 can be approximated by psychologically plausible processes.…”

“…This paper has provided computational theories (Marr, 1982) or rational analyses (Anderson, 1990) of inference in several inductive contexts. Our working assumption is that human inferences are approximately rational with respect to the structure of the world, and that choosing the best model for an inductive problem is a matter of formalizing some aspect of the world and deriving normative predictions given these formal commitments.…”

“…Bayesian methods are useful for developing computational theories of property induction (Marr, 1982), but a complete account of property induction will also need to describe the psychological mechanisms that carry out the computations required by these theories. Since the computational resources of the mind are limited, some computational theories will be implemented only approximately, and these approximations may lead to inferences that have no adequate explanation at the level of computational theory.…”

The Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program

“…Instead, it would allow various inferential and/or causal relations to experiential states to suffi ce for derived intentionality Tienson 2002, Horgan andGraham forthcoming, Loar 2003). As Davies (1995) notes, some sub-personal states, such as Marr's (1982) 2.5D sketches, are naturally construed as non-derivatively intentional but are not even potentially conscious by any intuitive construal of "potentially." However, even such states are cognitively integrated into a system of inferentially interrelated intentional states some of which are phenomenally conscious.…”

Ethology, Sociobiology, and Evolutionary Psychology

“…Evolutionary Psychology reflects the state of the sciences of the mind during its own formulation. In particular, the program was influenced by the dominant 'classical' school of cognitive science and the idea that the mind is computer software implemented in neural hardware (Marr 1982;Fodor 1983). Evolutionary Psychologists argue that the representational, information-processing language of classical cognitive science is ideal for describing the evolved features of the mind.…”