Some informational aspects of visual perception.

Abstract

xThe ideas of information theory are at present stimulating many different areas of psychological inquiry. In providing techniques for quantifying situations which have hitherto been difficult or impossible to quantify, they suggest new and more precise ways of conceptualizing these situations (see Miller [12] for a general discussion and bibliography). Events ordered in time are particularly amenable to informational analysis; thus language sequences are being extensively studied, and other sequences, such as those of music, plainly invite research. In this paper I shall indicate some of the ways in which the concepts and techniques of information theory may clarify our understanding of visual perception. When we begin to consider perception as an information-handling process, it quickly becomes clear that much of the information received by any higher organism is redundant. Sensory events are highly interdependent in both space and time: if we know at a given moment the states of a limited number of receptors (i.e., whether they are firing or not firing), we can make better-than-chance inferences with respect to the prior and subsequent states of these receptors, and also with respect to the present, prior, and subsequent states of other receptors. The preceding statement, taken in its broadest im1 The experimental work for this study was performed as part of the United States Air Force Human Resources Research and Development Program. The opinions and conclusions contained in this report are those of the author. They are not to be construed as reflecting the views or indorsement of the Department of the Air Force. plications, is precisely equivalent to an assertion that the world as we know it is lawful. In the present discussion, however, we shall restrict our attention to special types of lawfulness which may exist in space at a fixed time, and which seem particularly relevant to processes of visual perception.