Finding out about filling-in: a guide to perceptual completion for visual science and the philosophy of perception.
The Behavioral and brain sciences December 1, 1998 L Pessoa, E Thompson, A Noë 435 citations
Visual filling-in, the way the brain completes missing perceptual information, is often misunderstood because the term is used inconsistently. This article organizes perceptual completion phenomena into a taxonomy, distinguishing boundary completion (like illusory contours) from featural completion (color, brightness, motion, texture, depth). Reviewing single-cell studies, the author argues that some forms of completion involve spatially propagating neural activity, contradicting the view that filling-in merely ignores an absence. Measurable effects of perceptual completion depend on neural signals representing a presence. The author rejects the idea of a single neural stage underlying perception (the bridge locus) and argues against representational and enactive conceptions of vision, concluding that perceptual content should be evaluated at the level of the whole person interacting with the world.