Vision as looking and seeing through a bottleneck

Progress in vision research has been slower downstream than upstream of the primary visual cortex (V1). Traditional frameworks have largely overlooked a central constraint: only a tiny fraction of retinal input is recognized. Thus, to a first approximation, vision is better formulated as looking and seeing through a bottleneck. Looking, mainly by the peripheral visual field, selects visual information to enter this bottleneck, largely via gaze shifts that center selected contents at the fovea. Seeing, mainly by the central visual field, recognizes this content. Converging evidence suggests that V1 initiates the bottleneck and contributes to looking by generating a bottom-up saliency map that guides saccades exogenously, and that top-down feedback along the visual pathway, targeting mainly the representation of the central visual field, refines seeing. Progress will accelerate through falsifiable theories that explicitly link behavior with neural substrates, and by experimental designs that avoid forced fixations and precisely track gaze. • The brain's bottleneck forces vision to select content for seeing by looking. • Traditional research frameworks have focused on seeing and overlooked looking. • Logically, looking can occur before seeing, as is evident behaviorally. • V1 serves looking, initiates the bottleneck, and receives feedback to aid seeing. • Looking and seeing generalize to orienting and recognizing multisensorily