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

& Stanton, 1978; Sakata et al., 1985).
Second, cells in this area are also governed by extraretinal (i.e., attentional)
influences—they respond to attended targets, but not to unattended targets,
even when both are equally visible (Robinson, Goldberg, & Stanton, 1978). This is
required of mechanisms that can pick out and track targets from identically shaped
distractors, as in a multiple object tracking task.
Third, Area 7 cells that appear to be involved in tracking appear to be able to
do so across sensory modalities. For instance, hand projection neurons respond to
targets to which hand movements are to be directed and do not respond when either
the reach or the target are present alone (Robinson Goldberg, & Stanton, 1978).
Similarly, there exist many Area Y cells that respond during manual reaching,
tracking, or manipulation, and which also have a preferred direction of reaching
(Hyvarinen & Poranen, 1974). Such cross-modal coordination of tracking is critical,
because as we see in the next section, Pylyshyn’s (2003b, 2007) theory of visual
cognition assumes that indices can be applied, and tracked, in different sensory
modalities, permitting seeing agents to point at objects that have been visually
individuated.
The key innovation and contribution of Pylyshyn’s (2003b, 2007) theory of visual
cognition is the proposal of preattentive individuation and tracking. This proposal
can be seamlessly interfaced with related proposals concerning visual cognition.
For instance, once objects have been tagged by FINSTs, they can be operated on by
visual routines (Ullman, 1984, 2000). Pylyshyn (2003b) pointed out that in order to
execute, visual routines require such individuation:
The visual system must have some mechanism for picking out and referring to particular
elements in a display in order to decide whether two or more such elements
form a pattern, such as being collinear, or being inside, on, or part of another element,
so on. Pylyshyn (2003b, pp. 206–207)
In other words, visual cognition can direct attentional resources to FINSTed entities.
Pylyshyn’s (2003b, 2007) theory of visual cognition also makes contact with
classical cognition. He noted that once objects have been tagged, the visual system
can examine their spatial properties by applying visual routines or using focal
attention to retrieve visual features. The point of such activities by visual cognition
would be to update descriptions of objects stored as object files (Kahneman,
Treisman, & Gibbs, 1992). The object file descriptions can then be used to make contact
with the semantic categories of classical cognition. Thus the theory of visual
indexing provides a causal grounding of visual concepts:
Indexes may serve as the basis for real individuation of physical objects. While
it is clear that you cannot individuate objects in the full-blooded sense without a
conceptual apparatus, it is also clear that you cannot individuate them with only
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