Dubious Claims about Simplicity and Likelihood: Comment on Pinna and Conti (2019)

Brain Sci. 2020 Jan 16;10(1):50. doi: 10.3390/brainsci10010050.

Abstract

Pinna and Conti (Brain Sci., 2019, 9, 149, doi:10.3390/brainsci9060149) presented phenomena concerning the salience and role of contrast polarity in human visual perception, particularly in amodal completion. These phenomena are indeed illustrative thereof, but here, the focus is on their claims (1) that neither simplicity nor likelihood approaches can account for these phenomena; and (2) that simplicity and likelihood are equivalent. I argue that their first claim is based on incorrect assumptions, whereas their second claim is simply untrue.

Keywords: Bayes; classical information theory; contrast polarity; likelihood principle; modern information theory; perceptual organization; simplicity principle; simplicity–likelihood equivalence.