The Role of Long-Term Memory in Visual Perception

There has been a long-standing debate in philosophy and psychology about the role of representation in conscious visual perception. Here, we argue on the basis of evidence from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience that episodic and schematic memory representations are pivotal to the visual perception of objects and scenes. In the visual perception of objects and scenes, sensory information is initially matched with object and scene templates, or schemas, in long-term memory. The most relevant representations are then selected for encoding in working memory. We furthermore argue that episodic memory representations contribute to the fineness of grain of visual representations. The representational view of visual perception that emerges is what we call the "template tuning view." According to this view, prior information—specifically, long-term memories—shape the representational content of visual perception. In the final section of the chapter, we argue that unlike representational conceptions of visual perception, naïve and direct realist theories have difficulties accommodating these findings.