AN ECOLOGY-BASED APPROACH TO PERCEPTUAL MODELLING

摘要

The emergence of any organism's brain and behaviour cannot be explained solely by examining the organism itself. We must look beyond the organism and model the ecology as well. This is the philosophical difference between the approach that we propose and the traditional approaches that seek to model behaviour and/or neural networks. We propose treating features of the ecology as independent variables and determining which parameter values are sufficient for particular types of behaviour to arise. Biologically-inspired perceptual modelling has so far largely proceeded by mimicking known neural features or observed behaviours. However, these approaches do not explicitly model the source of the perception: the ecology. The approach described here is novel in that it focuses on the ecology of visual agents and their adaptation to their ecology, rather than being limited to imitating aspects of a particular animal's physiology or behaviour. This approach allows us to build counterfactual ecologies in which we can identify parameter values that are sufficient for the emergence of particular features of perception. Furthermore it allows us to extract the common strategies adopted by all agents in a given class of ecologies. We demonstrate the value of this approach by describing an ecology-based model of the perception of several optical illusions.