Abstract
It is widely accepted that computer implementations can play a role in verifying psychological theories. In this paper, I argue for a much broader and more abstract role for computation, in particular, one that includes formulation as well as verification. Consideration of issues of abstract computation—what should be computed and how-provides a level of analysis between ecological issues at the problem level and realization issues at the physiological level. This is the computational connection. The paper reflects my personal experience so that my argument can be made concretely. I concentrate on the evolution of one theory of orientation selection, and I show how we were led to differential geometry from “line detectors”; how parallel, distributed computational modeling led to novel proposals regarding curvature estimation; and how these proposals predicted psychophysical sensitivity to discontinuities.
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S.W. Zucker is a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. This research was sponsored by NSERC Grant A4470. A. Dobbins, R. Hummel, L. Iverson, Y. Leclerc, N. Link, and P. Parent all participated in essential ways to the research project on orientation selection.
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Zucker, S.W. The computational connection in vision: Early orientation selection. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 18, 608–617 (1986). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201436
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201436