Computational cognitive neuroscience of the visual system

Should psychologists care about functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)? Within the field of visual perception, the answer to this question is an emphatic "yes." There is a long history of close interactions between psychology and neuroscience in the study of vision. In the 1980s, vision researchers developed a general framework for combining the two fields, and that framework still supports much current research. This article will briefly cover this general approach and then will illustrate how neuroimaging allows the framework to be applied to human perception. In short, fMRI can measure how information is represented in sequential stages of processing. These same representations can also be measured behaviorally. Theories of vision specify how the sequential representations participate in well-defined computations that underlie perception.