Pattern vision articles from across Nature Portfolio

Humans can infer a range of material properties from a brief glance. In this Review, Xiao and Liao discuss the varied facets of visual material perception, including its relationship to action planning and broader cognition.

It is unclear how higher brain areas use feedback to help early visual cortex analyze complex scenes. Here, the authors show that feedback is crucial for various figure-ground percepts and involves distinct facilitatory and inhibitory signals.

Even before training, convolutional neural networks may reflect the brain’s visual processing principles. A study now shows how structure alone can help to explain the alignment between brains and models.

In this Journal Club, Benjamin Cowley discusses a 2009 tour-de-force that provided a recipe for constructing closed-loop algorithms by letting predictive models speak for themselves.

Inputs to the central complex, the navigation center of Drosophila, are strongly modulated by the visual stimulus history. These history effects carry forward to bias turning behavior when flies choose between two visual stimuli.