ABSTRACT
Perception can be characterized as a decision-making process: the brain decides what is “out there” in the world on the basis of incoming information and prior expectations. Decisions generally involve a selection among a limited set of alternatives, which suggests that questions are asked on the basis of prior knowledge. If the decision is to be made, for example, about which letter of the alphabet an ambiguous figure is supposed to represent, then the question for most of us would be to distinguish among the twenty-six alternatives, A through Z, that are specified by our prior knowledge. In attending to the perception of that figure, we would be asking a question that would relate the new to the known. Incoming information is matched to the distinctive feature specifications of the alternatives we are considering, and what we “see” is what the brain decides. A different set of distinctive features would be consulted if we thought we were attending to a number.
