Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

independent of those for processing form (Botez, 1975; Livingstone & Hubel, 1988;
Maunsell & Newsome, 1987; Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982).
A fourth reason to reject image matching is that it is a purely cognitive
approach to individuating and tracking entities. “Philosophers typically assume
that in order to individuate something we must conceptualize its relevant properties.
In other words, we must first represent (or cognize or conceptualize) the
relevant conditions of individuation” (Pylyshyn, 2007, p. 31). Pylyshyn rejected this
approach because it suffers from the same core problem as the New Look: it lacks
causal links to the world.
Pylyshyn’s initial exploration of how diagrams aided reasoning led to his realization
that the individuation and tracking of visual entities are central to an account
of how vision links us to the world. For the reasons just presented, he rejected a
purely classical approach—mental descriptions of entities—for providing these
fundamental abilities. He proposed instead a theory that parallels the structure of
the examples of visual cognition described earlier. That is, Pylyshyn’s (2003b, 2007)
theory of visual cognition includes a non-cognitive component (early vision), which
delivers representations that can be accessed by visual attention (visual cognition),
which in turn deliver representations that can be linked to general knowledge of the
world (cognition).
On the one hand, the early vision component of Pylyshyn’s (2003b, 2007) theory
of visual cognition is compatible with natural computation accounts of perception
(Ballard, 1997; Marr, 1982). For Pylyshyn, the role of early vision is to provide causal
links between the world and the perceiving agent without invoking cognition or
inference:
Only a highly constrained set of properties can be selected by early vision, or can
be directly ‘picked up.’ Roughly, these are what I have elsewhere referred to as
‘transducable’ properties. These are the properties whose detection does not require
accessing memory and drawing inferences. (Pylyshyn, 2003b, p. 163)
The use of natural constraints to deliver representations such as the primal sketch
and the 2½-D sketch is consistent with Pylyshyn’s view.
On the other hand, Pylyshyn (2003b, 2007) added innovations to traditional
natural computation theories that have enormous implications for explanations of
seeing and visualizing. First, Pylyshyn argued that one of the primitive processes
of early vision is individuation—the picking out of an entity as being distinct from
others. Second, he used evidence from feature integration theory and cognitive neuroscience
to claim that individuation picks out objects, but not on the basis of their
locations. That is, preattentive processes can detect elements or entities via primitive
features but simultaneously not deliver the location of the features, as is the case
in pop-out. Third, Pylyshyn argued that an individuated entity—a visual object—is
preattentively tagged by an index, called a FINST (“for finger instantiation”), which
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