Evolution and optimality of similar neural mechanisms for perception and action during search.

ABSTRACT: A prevailing theory proposes that the brain's two visual pathways, the ventral and dorsal, lead to differing visual processing and world representations for conscious perception than those for action. Others have claimed that perception and action share much of their visual processing. But which of these two neural architectures is favored by evolution? Successful visual search is life-critical and here we investigate the evolution and optimality of neural mechanisms mediating perception and eye movement actions for visual search in natural images. We implement an approximation to the ideal Bayesian searcher with two separate processing streams, one controlling the eye movements and the other stream determining the perceptual search decisions. We virtually evolved the neural mechanisms of

SUBMITTER: Zhang S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2936525 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature