The Role of Generative Knowledge in Object Perception

Combining multiple sensory cues is an effective strategy for improving perceptual judgments in principle, but in practice it demands sophisticated processing to extract useful information. Sensory cues are signals from the environment available through sensory modalities; perceptions are internal estimates about the world's state derived from sensory cues and prior assumptions about the world. The influence that world properties have on sensory cues is inherently complicated, so recovering information about the world from sensations is a difficult problem. This chapter discusses "generative knowledge" as a unifying framework regarding how biological brains overcome these difficulties to interpret sensory cues.