Model of perception: The hierarchy of inclusive sensory characteristics and top-down cascade transfer of excitation
The article offers a new view on the organization of the processes of human perception. It introduces the concept of inclusive sensory characteristic, which is a response of a given perceptual level to those features or characteristics of an underlying level whose spatial organization or specific temporal succession constitutes an adaptively meaningful entity. The sequence of inclusive characteristics forms a hierarchy: from features to the highest inclusive characteristics which bind sensory data into unified images and scenes. The highest inclusive characteristic is neither an image nor a scene, but a unique scheme of combination of underlying-level objects, which produces the image or the scene. Specific patterns of electric activity, which map inclusive characteristics, are relayed by feedbacks from upper to lower neuronal levels. This forms a cascade of top-down transfer of excitation, which stimulates those neuronal populations whose signals correspond to the highest inclusive characteristic of a given act of perception. Stimulation from above reduces the time of response of selected neurons at underlying levels to simultaneously arriving spikes to milliseconds. As a result, neuronal. populations at the underlying levels, which are involved in a given act of perception, become, for a short time, coincidence detectors. The hierarchically arranged set of neuronal ensembles of coincidence detectors forms a fast sensory pathway, single and unique for each act of perception.
perception inclusive sensory characteristics binding problem top-down excitation