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Vision and Memory: Looking Beyond Immediate Visual Perception

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Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision

Part of the book series: Cognitive Science and Technology ((CSAT))

Abstract

The topic of vision is “often studied as if our conscious experience were the ultimate end-product of visual processing” (Hayhoe 2009), with research sometimes overly focused on immediate visual perception—processes aimed at understanding the current visual scene or episode. However, in many situations, visual perception alone is insufficient, and what is also needed is visual memory. In particular, natural visual behavior in the real world requires much more than just understanding the present scene, and often involves the deliberate choice and planning of a sequence of routines or operations involving both vision and memory. These routines are under the active control of the system, and dynamically affect what is seen: the choice of routine affects what is seen, and conversely, what is seen affects subsequent choice of routine. Thus, in real-world tasks, visual perception and memory are intrinsically linked. In this chapter, we explain how for real-world visual tasks, immediate visual perception is not sufficient, and it interacts with visual memory virtually all the time.

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Tan, C., Lallee, S., Mandal, B. (2017). Vision and Memory: Looking Beyond Immediate Visual Perception. In: Zhao, Q. (eds) Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision. Cognitive Science and Technology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0213-7_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0213-7_9

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