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RESEARCH PRODUCT

David Marr: A Theory for Cerebral Neocortex

W. Von Seelen

subject

Cognitive scienceVisual processingStructure (mathematical logic)HierarchyConstant (computer programming)Computer scienceConcept learningTheory of computationRedundancy (engineering)Abstraction (mathematics)

description

This paper is an important contribution to the understanding of the visual system, it contains a part of those ideas which have become the commonly accepted basis of current research. Although some of these principles already had a history in 1970, Marr clearly deserves the credit for their sharp formulation and for a series of attempts leading to a formalization of the problems. His way of dividing the approach into the levels of computational theory, of the algorithm and of the implementation clarified the problems. His creed that human visual processing is modular, and that different types of information, which are encoded in the image can be decoded independently by modules, has been generally accepted. His idea that the neuronal structure is adapted to the structure of the signals from the environment, which can be viewed as locally homogeneous, constant and with a tendency towards continuity, has given rise to fruitful research. The idea of concept formation occupies an important place. This principle holds that the diagnosis of the outer world is realized on the basis of forming concepts (chair, lover, music etc.), and that basic concepts form a hierarchy with different levels of abstraction. Although this idea is older than his paper, his formalization of it in statistical terms is one of the high points of the paper along with his statements on redundancy.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-70911-1_23