Toward a Single-Cell Account for Binocular Disparity Tuning: An Energy Model May Be Hiding in Your Dendrites

To understand human object recognition, it is essential to understand how objects are represented in human visual memory. A central component in object recognition is the matching of the stored object representation with that derived from the image input.But the nature of the object representation has to be inferred from recognition performance, by taking into account the contribution from the image information. When evaluating human performance, how can one separate the con- 830 ZLiu and D. Kersten tributions to performance of the image information from the representation? Ideal observer analysis provides a precise computational tool to answer this question. An ideal observer's recognition performance is restricted only by the available image information and is otherwise optimal, in the sense of statistical decision theory, irrespective of how the model is implemented.