David Marr

To understand the relationship between behavior and brain one has to begin by defining the function, or computational goal, of a complete behavior. Only then can a neuroscientist determine how the brain achieves that goal.

— David Marr

Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information.

— David Marr

A representation is a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types of information, together with a specification of how the system does this. And I shall call the result of using a representation to describe a given entity a description of the entity in that representation.

— David Marr

The critical act in formulating computational theories turns out to be the discovery of valid constraints on the way the world is structured -- constraints that provide sufficient information to allow the processing to succeed.

— David Marr

The primitives of a representation are the most elementary units of shape information available in a representation.

— David Marr

Vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it is.

— David Marr

The abstract properties of this mapping are defined precisely, and its appropriateness and adequacy for the task at hand are demonstrated.

— David Marr

In order to understand bird flight, we have to understand aerodynamics; only then does the structure of feathers and the different shapes of bird's wings make sense.

— David Marr

Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information.

— David Marr

[If] we can experimentally isolate a process and show that it can still work well, then it cannot require complex interaction with other parts of vision and can therefore be understood relatively well on its own.

— David Marr