On 2016 May 17, Lydia Maniatis commented:

(My two PubPeer comments)

Here's the funny thing about vision science these days.

We are told about a prolific area of research - 'visual averaging': “New research tools and imaging techniques coupled with solid psychophysical work have added substantially to the large base of work done in the 20th century.”

Then we learn (caps mine) that: “Some lively debates regarding the scope of the putative sampler/averager and EVEN ITS EXISTENCE have sharpened the questions being asked and reminded researchers to consider scaling issues, experimenter and observer bias, and the multidimensional nature of stimuli and ensembles.”

It is the nature of a dogma and the school that collects around it to act on the basis of assumptions that are never challenged. Research projects are designed so that they cannot challenge the dogma, but only answer questions in its terms. (That something like this is going on here is evidenced by the author's concession that claims of possible non-existence of “averagers” remain viable despite decades of research activity.) It's the nature of science to test its fundamental assumptions before proceeding to elaborate on them. If a claim is falsifiable, in a healthy research environment it will be quickly falsified. (If it cannot be tested even in principle, then it's outside the game of science and cannot constitute a legitimate field of empirical investigation). In the type of environment we have now, it will remain in good standing for the foreseeable future. (This is the case, for example, with the bizarre notion of “spatial frequency filters.”)

On some of the absurdities coming out of “averaging” proponents, see comments here: https://pubpeer.com/publications/90941136CC181AFE4896477BF5BB44 and here:

https://pubpeer.com/publications/26067519

The faith-based tendency to accumulate evidence (supposedly) in favour of the dogma is related to this field's (invalid) adoption of inductive procedures rather than hypothesis-testing. If we just keep measuring things and fitting algorithms to the data, the truth will naturally emerge:

"The psychophysical function and the environmental information on which it is based should be allowed to emerge without predilection, lest the true mental algorithm be obscured by expectation (Anderson, 1968; Levin, 1975).... It is well known that psychological measurement is not impervious to the effects of context, scaling, measurement error, and other issues that can hinder the revelation of the true psychophysical relationship." Expectations, aka hypotheses, should stay well away lest they interfere with revelation.

Despite decades of patient effort and mountains of "evidence," we're still waiting for the true psychophysical function to be revealed. What if it doesn't exist? What if it can never be spotted amongst the confounds, known and unknown?

As we wait, we might ask what it means that "perceptual averages" have never been perceived? In what sense is an unperceived percept perceptible? (If averages were perceptible, there would be no question of their existence; we would be trying to explain perceptual facts rather than waiting for these facts to be revealed.)

On 2016 May 17, Lydia Maniatis commented:

(My two PubPeer comments)

Here's the funny thing about vision science these days.

We are told about a prolific area of research - 'visual averaging': “New research tools and imaging techniques coupled with solid psychophysical work have added substantially to the large base of work done in the 20th century.”

Then we learn (caps mine) that: “Some lively debates regarding the scope of the putative sampler/averager and EVEN ITS EXISTENCE have sharpened the questions being asked and reminded researchers to consider scaling issues, experimenter and observer bias, and the multidimensional nature of stimuli and ensembles.”

It is the nature of a dogma and the school that collects around it to act on the basis of assumptions that are never challenged. Research projects are designed so that they cannot challenge the dogma, but only answer questions in its terms. (That something like this is going on here is evidenced by the author's concession that claims of possible non-existence of “averagers” remain viable despite decades of research activity.) It's the nature of science to test its fundamental assumptions before proceeding to elaborate on them. If a claim is falsifiable, in a healthy research environment it will be quickly falsified. (If it cannot be tested even in principle, then it's outside the game of science and cannot constitute a legitimate field of empirical investigation). In the type of environment we have now, it will remain in good standing for the foreseeable future. (This is the case, for example, with the bizarre notion of “spatial frequency filters.”)

On some of the absurdities coming out of “averaging” proponents, see comments here: https://pubpeer.com/publications/90941136CC181AFE4896477BF5BB44 and here:

https://pubpeer.com/publications/26067519

The faith-based tendency to accumulate evidence (supposedly) in favour of the dogma is related to this field's (invalid) adoption of inductive procedures rather than hypothesis-testing. If we just keep measuring things and fitting algorithms to the data, the truth will naturally emerge:

"The psychophysical function and the environmental information on which it is based should be allowed to emerge without predilection, lest the true mental algorithm be obscured by expectation (Anderson, 1968; Levin, 1975).... It is well known that psychological measurement is not impervious to the effects of context, scaling, measurement error, and other issues that can hinder the revelation of the true psychophysical relationship." Expectations, aka hypotheses, should stay well away lest they interfere with revelation.

Despite decades of patient effort and mountains of "evidence," we're still waiting for the true psychophysical function to be revealed. What if it doesn't exist? What if it can never be spotted amongst the confounds, known and unknown?

As we wait, we might ask what it means that "perceptual averages" have never been perceived? In what sense is an unperceived percept perceptible? (If averages were perceptible, there would be no question of their existence; we would be trying to explain perceptual facts rather than waiting for these facts to be revealed.)