Tasks and their role in visual neuroscience

Vision is widely used as a model system to gain insights into how sensory inputs are processed and inter-preted by the brain. Historically, careful quantification and control of visual stimuli have served as the back -bone of visual neuroscience. There has been less emphasis, however, on how an observer's task influences the processing of sensory inputs. Motivated by diverse observations of task-dependent activity in the visual system, we propose a framework for thinking about tasks, their role in sensory processing, and how we might formally incorporate tasks into our models of vision.