Abstract
From the early times in which Psychology began to acquire the status of an autonomous scientific discipline, the theories of visual perception were faced with a fundamentale dilemma: is visual perception the result of bottom-up or of top-down mechanisms? Extremizing a little, we can say that the kind of answer given to this question subdivides the theories of perception into two different categories, corresponding to two entirely different, and contrasting, views (on such a contraposition a very old reference is given by Titchener1; more recent schematizations are contained in Rock2, or in Humphreys & Bruce3):
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Stimulus-Based View, according to which perceptual phenomena are determined only by physical features of stimulation patterns; between the holders of such a view we wil include most designers of Artificial Vision Systems; it supports also the traditional, and very popular, subdivision of image processing into stages 4, shown in the Figure below.
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Constructivist View, according to which perceptual phenomena are nothing but the result of a construction done by the observer, driven both by his/her Cognitive Schemata, and by physical features of stimulation patterns, like graphically shown in the Figure 2.
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Pessa, E. (2002). Bottom-Up and Top-Down Mechanisms. In: Cantoni, V., Marinaro, M., Petrosino, A. (eds) Visual Attention Mechanisms. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0111-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0111-4_6
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