How You Know What You Know
In a now classic paper, Blakemore and Cooper (1970) showed that if a newborn cat is deprived of experiences with horizontal lines (i.e., is raised in an environment that is without horizontal stripes), it will fail to develop neurons in visual areas that are sensitive to horizontal edges. If the cat is exposed to horizontal lines while the visual areas are still optimally plastic (when the effects of learning and entrenchment have yet to set in), some neurons will quickly become selective to the feature, firing reliably when horizontal lines are part of the incoming sensation. These neurons are often referred to as ‘feature detectors’ even though the actual detection of the feature is always a network effect, that is, not the result of an isolated neuron firing, leading some to use the term tuned filters instead (see, e.g., Clark 1997 ). It is well-known that our ability to categorize depends on our experiences with the objects of such categorization; moreover, research ...
