Figure 1.

Schematic representation of the reverse hierarchy theory (Hochstein and Ahissar, 2002). Following a first phase of automatic unconscious feedforward sweep, conscious vision emerges in high-level visual areas with global information. Local details encoded in low-level visual areas can be consciously retrieved, but this would occur optionally if required by current goals. Recurrent activities are involved (Lamme and Roelfsema, 2000; Boehler et al., 2008) that are not represented here, for presentation purposes.