On 2017 Jan 04, Lydia Maniatis commented:

This article belongs to the popular "transparent brain" school of thought. (The label is inspired by Graham (1992) see comment https://pubpeer.com/publications/8F9314481736594E8D58E237D3C0D0).

That is, certain visual scenes selectively tap neurons at particular levels of the visual system, such that by analyzing the percept we can draw conclusions about the behavior of groups of neurons at that level.

Teller (1984) called this view the "nothing mucks it up proviso," referring to the fact that it assumes all other parts of the hierarchically-organized, complicatedly interconnected visual system play no role in the particular effect of interest.

The untenable transparent brain fiction is compromised even further by the "simple" stimuli that are supposed to enable the transparent view into V1 etc, as they actually elicit highly sophisticated 3D percepts including effects such as the perception of light and shadow and fog/transparency. OF course, these perceptual features are mediated by the activity of V1 (etc) neurons. But the factors the investigators reference - orientation here, often contrast - are somehow supposed to retain their power to reflect only the behavior of V1 (or whatever level particular investigators are claiming to isolate and "model.")

On 2017 Jan 04, Lydia Maniatis commented:

This article belongs to the popular "transparent brain" school of thought. (The label is inspired by Graham (1992) see comment https://pubpeer.com/publications/8F9314481736594E8D58E237D3C0D0).

That is, certain visual scenes selectively tap neurons at particular levels of the visual system, such that by analyzing the percept we can draw conclusions about the behavior of groups of neurons at that level.

Teller (1984) called this view the "nothing mucks it up proviso," referring to the fact that it assumes all other parts of the hierarchically-organized, complicatedly interconnected visual system play no role in the particular effect of interest.

The untenable transparent brain fiction is compromised even further by the "simple" stimuli that are supposed to enable the transparent view into V1 etc, as they actually elicit highly sophisticated 3D percepts including effects such as the perception of light and shadow and fog/transparency. OF course, these perceptual features are mediated by the activity of V1 (etc) neurons. But the factors the investigators reference - orientation here, often contrast - are somehow supposed to retain their power to reflect only the behavior of V1 (or whatever level particular investigators are claiming to isolate and "model.")