A hypothesis connecting visual pattern recognition and apparent motion

The study improves upon a previous hypothesis which claims a connection between the existence of a certain visual apparentmotion effect and the capacity of the visual system to recognize, in a very general sense, objects that have undergone certain transformations. In the present work a sharper hypothesis is developed by making use of the notion of visual recognition defined with respect to a fixed local Lie transformation group G. Considering the apparent-motion effect between an object A and some transform (A) of A as arising from the action of a certain 1-parameter family of transformations generated by the visual system, this hypothesis asserts that if the 1-parameter family lies entirely within G, then the visual system is capable of recognizing with respect to G the transformed object (A) as the original object A.