Perception as Prediction
Stephen A. Hockema · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2004
Learning is often about prediction. This paper asks whether perception is also. The main idea is that perception is a stream and that perceivers learn the trajectory through which one moment in that stream turns into the next. A behavioral experiment with children is described that tests two hypotheses developed from this idea.. In the experiment, children briefly watch a transformation (e.g., a triangle increasing in size and/or saturation). If children learn the trajectory of change and if prediction is at the core of perception, then a subsequent statically presented object should trigger the perceptual system to anticipate the “next state”. To test this, children were asked to make same/different judgments that should, by hypothesis, be interfered with by the learned trajectory. Children became less able to detect pairs that were the “same ” when asked to make judgments about the dimension that they had seen varied. Furthermore, there was evidence that two dimensions could be made more integral by covarying them simultaneously. Both of these results were simulated with a simple connectionist model constructed to embody a predictive mechanism. Taken together, these results lend support to the idea that the perceptual system is designed to make predictions in time and that this architecture gives a “dynamic ” aspect to perception.