The memory color effect and Spanish castle illusion are taken as evidence of the cognitive penetrability of vision. In the same manner, the successful decoding of color-related brain signals in functional neuroimaging studies suggests the retrieval of memory colors associated with a perceived gray object. Here, we offer an alternative account of these findings based on the design principles of adaptive resonance theory (ART). In ART, conscious perception is a consequence of a resonant state. Resonance emerges in a recurrent cortical circuit when a bottom-up spatial pattern agrees with the top-down expectation. When they do not agree, a special control mechanism is activated that resets the network and clears off erroneous expectation, thus allowing the bottom-up activity to always dominate in perception. We developed a color ART circuit and evaluated its behavior in computer simulations. The model helps to explain how traces of erroneous expectations about incoming color are eventually removed from the color perception, although their transient effect may be visible in behavioral responses or in brain imaging. Our results suggest that the color ART circuit, as a predictive computational system, is almost never penetrable, because it is equipped with computational mechanisms designed to constrain the impact of the top-down predictions on ongoing perceptual processing.

记忆色彩效果和西班牙城堡错觉被视为视觉的认知渗透性的证据。以相同的方式，在功能性神经影像研究中成功解码了与颜色相关的大脑信号，这表明检索与感知的灰色物体相关的记忆颜色。在这里，我们根据自适应共振理论（ART）的设计原理提供了这些发现的替代解释。在ART中，有意识的感知是共振状态的结果。当自下而上的空间模式与自上而下的预期一致时，在循环皮层回路中会出现共振。如果他们不同意，则会激活一种特殊的控制机制，该机制将重置网络并清除错误的期望，从而使自下而上的活动始终在感知中占主导地位。我们开发了彩色ART电路，并在计算机仿真中评估了其行为。该模型有助于解释如何最终从颜色感知中消除对传入颜色的错误期望的痕迹，尽管它们的短暂影响可能在行为反应或大脑成像中可见。我们的结果表明，彩色ART电路作为一种预测性计算系统，几乎永远不会渗透，因为它配备了旨在限制自上而下的预测对正在进行的感知处理的影响的计算机制。