Dubious Claims about Simplicity and Likelihood: Comment on Pinna and Conti (2019)
Department of Brain & Cognition, University of Leuven (K.U. Leuven), Tiensestraat 102-box 3711, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium
Brain Sci. 2020, 10(1), 50; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10010050
Received: 17 September 2019 / Revised: 10 January 2020 / Accepted: 13 January 2020 / Published: 16 January 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Vividness, Consciousness, and Mental Imagery: Making the Missing Links across Disciplines and Methods)
Pinna and Conti (Brain Sci., 2019, 9, 149, doi:10.3390/brainsci9060149) presented phenomena concerning the salience and role of contrast polarity in human visual perception, particularly in amodal completion. These phenomena are indeed illustrative thereof, but here, the focus is on their claims (1) that neither simplicity nor likelihood approaches can account for these phenomena; and (2) that simplicity and likelihood are equivalent. I argue that their first claim is based on incorrect assumptions, whereas their second claim is simply untrue.
Keywords:
contrast polarity; perceptual organization; simplicity principle; likelihood principle; simplicity–likelihood equivalence; Bayes; classical information theory; modern information theory
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
van der Helm, P.A. Dubious Claims about Simplicity and Likelihood: Comment on Pinna and Conti (2019). Brain Sci. 2020, 10, 50.
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