On 2017 Jun 29, Lydia Maniatis commented:

It is interesting that the strawman description (the purely feedforward description) that Heeger is correctly and trivially rejecting in this article is the description serving as the major theoretical premise of a more recent PNAS article (Greenwood, Szinte, Sayim and Cavanagh (2017)) of which Heeger served as editor, and which I have been extensively critiquing. Some representative quotes from that article:

"Given that the receptive fields at each stage in the visual system are likely built via the summation of inputs from the preceding stages..."

"...idiosyncrasies in early retinotopic maps...would be propagated throughout the system and magnified as one moved up the cortical hierarchy."

"Given the hierarchical structure of the visual system, with inherited receptive field properties at each stage..."

These descriptions are never qualified in Greenwood et al (2017), and guide the interpretation of data. How does Heeger reconcile the assertions in the paper he edited with the assertions in his own paper?

On 2017 Jun 17, Lydia Maniatis commented:

Given that the number of possible realities (distribution of matter and light) underlying each instance of retinal stimulation is infinite; given that each instance of retinal stimulation is unique: given that any individual's experience represents only a small subsample of possible experience; given that, as is well-known, lifetime experience (not least for the reasons given above) cannot explain perception (what do we see when we lack the experience needed to re-cognize something?), Heeger's (2017) references to prior probability distributions are unintelligible (and thus untestable).

The question of how these statistical distributions are supposed to be instantiated in the brain is also left open, another reason this non-credible "theory" is untestable. All we have is a set of equations that can't be linked to any relevant aspect of the reality they're supposed to explain.

On 2017 Jun 17, Lydia Maniatis commented:

Given that the number of possible realities (distribution of matter and light) underlying each instance of retinal stimulation is infinite; given that each instance of retinal stimulation is unique: given that any individual's experience represents only a small subsample of possible experience; given that, as is well-known, lifetime experience (not least for the reasons given above) cannot explain perception (what do we see when we lack the experience needed to re-cognize something?), Heeger's (2017) references to prior probability distributions are unintelligible (and thus untestable).

The question of how these statistical distributions are supposed to be instantiated in the brain is also left open, another reason this non-credible "theory" is untestable. All we have is a set of equations that can't be linked to any relevant aspect of the reality they're supposed to explain.

On 2017 Jun 29, Lydia Maniatis commented:

It is interesting that the strawman description (the purely feedforward description) that Heeger is correctly and trivially rejecting in this article is the description serving as the major theoretical premise of a more recent PNAS article (Greenwood, Szinte, Sayim and Cavanagh (2017)) of which Heeger served as editor, and which I have been extensively critiquing. Some representative quotes from that article:

"Given that the receptive fields at each stage in the visual system are likely built via the summation of inputs from the preceding stages..."

"...idiosyncrasies in early retinotopic maps...would be propagated throughout the system and magnified as one moved up the cortical hierarchy."

"Given the hierarchical structure of the visual system, with inherited receptive field properties at each stage..."

These descriptions are never qualified in Greenwood et al (2017), and guide the interpretation of data. How does Heeger reconcile the assertions in the paper he edited with the assertions in his own paper?