Abstract

The present work aims to arrive at a functional understanding of the visual computations within one perceptual instant of time. When perceiving the external world, we feel surrounded by a sensory environment that extends continuously into both space and time. However, the content of conscious thought consists of coherent scenes containing a limited number of discrete objects as an invariant percept within one particular instance of time. Here, vision is investigated as a process that extracts spatio-temporally invariant information about the physical world and at the same time integrates the current perceptual representation into a dynamic stream of visual impressions.