>>14078079If you think about it, it makes biological sense for there to be such a feedback loop: imagine you're on high alert and scanning the environment for some kind of pattern (e.g. food, predators, whatever); maybe it's dark, or foggy, or you're looking through a bunch of vegetation, so the specific visual signature you're looking for is going to be faint, and the visual input is going to be very noisy; clearly, you want some mechanism to amplify any potential matches, so here's one possible mechanism:
1. The brain detects a vague pattern
2. The brain fills in some blanks and feeds the result back as visual input
3. This makes you pay more attention relevant region of your visial field
4. You acquire more visual information about the source of your perception
5a. If the extra information is incompatible with what you're looking for, the loop breaks
5b. If it is compatible with what you're looking for, the feedback loop continues
One question that immediately arises is why not do this kind of processing on a higher level, like in whatever networks in the brain do visual interpretation, instead of feeding back into the bottom level of literal sight? My guess is so that you could differentiate between vivid imagination and visual enhancement critical for your survival, and also because that lower level of processing is probably more directly connected to instinctive responses than higher level processing related to visual imagination.
