![]() The behavioral experimentalist and the biopsychologist can have a role in revealing those computations, but only as long as they understand that overall behavior or biological details have limited explanatory powers by themselves. The core of the system’s operations needs to be studied using computational tools, such as neural networks. The overall behavior of the system and its nuts and bolts per se do not capture its essence. We believe that the essence of the perceptual systems lies in the computations they perform. It is our claim that both the pure behavioral experimentalist and the pure biopsychologist are indeed studying some aspects of perception, but that they both fail to pinpoint and study the real essence of perception. Both present a seemingly conflicting view of what is the underlying core of perception, and what type of explanations and generalizations would have the best explanatory power for deciphering perception. ![]() Both types of experimentalists, behavioral- and bio-psychologists, have distinct frameworks for studying perception. They penetrate the behaviorist “black box” by examining its physical construction from synaptic activation and modification, to molecular structures. In addition, with the conceptual shift that was promoted by Hebb’s book on behavior as a function of cortical organization ( Hebb, 1949), many researchers are now studying the neural and biological underpinnings of perception. Although they continue the methodological approaches of behaviorism, they now use the empirical data to penetrate the behaviorist “black box.” The data are used to construct models and ascertain the processes of the inner self. They measure thresholds, reaction time, and other finely tuned quantifiable behaviors that depend upon perception. On the one hand, many experimentalists still study behavior. Although psychology has come a long way from those early attempts at studying perception, the field has yet to pinpoint what is perception and how it should be studied. Then the behaviorist approach reduced perception to external stimuli-response reactions. In the early days of psychology, perception was viewed as an introspective subjective experience. Schreiner, in Advances in Psychology, 1998 Perception
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