Cite as:
Petkov N, 2004, "Framework for testing biological-utility hypotheses" Perception 33 ECVP Abstract Supplement

Framework for testing biological-utility hypotheses

N Petkov

Various aspects of the visual system have been claimed to have certain biological role. The usual argument is that a given neural mechanism would help an animal to perform better a certain task. Such speculations are typically not supported by quantitative measurements and statistical studies. I propose a framework for verification of biological-utility hypotheses that includes defining a measure that quantifies the performance of a given subsystem in a certain task and collecting statistics about this measure on a reasonable number of images. A hypothesis is confirmed or rejected by using the distribution of the performance improvement/degradation values obtained by taking the considered mechanism into account in a computational model of the concerned subsystem. This framework for utility verification follows an approach previously deployed for the comparison of biologically motivated contour-detection algorithms in a computer science context (Grigorescu et al, 2003 IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 12 729 - 739). The framework is applied to non-classical receptive-field inhibition for which the detection of object contours (Petkov and Westenberg, 2003 Biological Cybernetics 88 236 - 246) and texture boundaries (Nothdurft et al, 1999 Visual Neuroscience 16 15 - 34) has been suggested as probable biological utility.

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