Modeling as part of perception: a hypothesis on the function of neural oscillations

Abstract

We argue that the effectiveness of synchronization of oscillatory neural activities coding simple features, as it relates to perceptual organization, may originate in the temporal characteristics of resonance that develops in a two-stroke architecture of neural information processing a cycling between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. We provide empirical evidence to support the idea that resonance involves the generation and evaluation of 'models' of spatial and temporal stimulus attributes. By virtue of temporal modeling, temporally assisted spatial segmentation comes to be very precisely determined by the combination of both global and local stimulus phase.