Stephen Grossberg

Steels & Belpaeme (S&B) ask how autonomous agents can derive perceptually grounded categories for successful communication, using color categorization as an example. Their comparison of nativism, empiricism, and culturalism, although interesting, does not include key biological and technological constraints for seeing color or learning color categories in realistic environments. Other neural models have successfully included these constraints.

To understand schizophrenia, a linking hypothesis is needed that shows how brain mechanisms lead to behavioral functions in normals, and also how breakdowns in these mechanisms lead to behavioral symptoms of schizophrenia. Such a linking hypothesis is now available that complements the discussion offered by Phillips & Silverstein (P&S).

Boundary completion and surface filling-in are computationally complementary processes whose multiple processing stages form processing streams that realize a hierarchical resolution of uncertainty. Such complementarity and uncertainty principles provide a new foundation for philosophical discussions about visual perception, and lead to neural explanations of difficult perceptual data.