This article defends the claim that a significant part of visual perception (called "early vision") is impervious to the influence of beliefs, expectations or knowledge. We examine a wide range of empirical evidence that has been cited in support of the continuity of vision and cognition and argue that the evidence either shows withinvision top-down effects, or else the extra-visual effects that are demonstrated occur before the operation of the autonomous early vision system (through the allocation of focal attention) or after the visual system has produced its 3D shape-description (through the intervention of post-visual decision processes).

Contents 1. The puzzle of seeing......................................1-2 1.1 Why do things look the way they do? ..................................................................................1-2 1.2 What is seeing? .................................................................................................................1-3 1.3 Does vision create a "picture" in the head?...........................................................................1-4 1.3.1 The richness of visual appearances and the poverty of visual information: Reconciling the difference ...........................................................................................1-4 1.3.2 Some reasons for thinking there may be an inner display................................................1-6 1.4 Some problems with the Internal Display Assumption: Part I: What's in the display and how does it get there?....................................................................1-10 1.4.1 How is

This article defends the claim that a significant part of visual perception (called "early vision") is impervious to the influence of beliefs, expectations or knowledge.

To advance research, it is important to identify promising future research directions, especially those that have not been adequately pursued or funded in the past. The working group producing this article was charged to elicit from the human language technology (HLT) community a set of well-considered directions or rich areas for future research that could lead to major paradigm shifts in the field of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and understanding. ASR has been an area of great interest and activity to the signal processing and HLT communities over the past several decades. As a first step, this group reviewed major developments in the field and the circumstances that led to their success and then focused on areas it deemed especially fertile for future research. Part 1 of this article will focus on historically significant developments in the ASR area, including several major research efforts that were guided by different funding agencies, and suggest general areas in which to focus research. Part 2 (to appear in the next issue) will explore in more detail several new avenues holding promise for substantial improvements in ASR performance. These entail cross-disciplinary research and specific approaches to address three-to-five-year grand challenges aimed at stimulating advanced research by dealing with realistic tasks of broad interest.