congruency

congruency effects are all over the place. like the simon effect where it's easier/faster to respond in the same place as you just saw a stimulus. or "pavlovian" effects where action is congruent with valence.

i wonder if using natural objects as cues in a task, as opposed to fractals, is another form of the same principle of "congruency". they look like our predictions, so it's easier to deal with them.

i know how to deal with this, it's a self-contained object, it's not going to start animating or bleeding off the edges or whatever. all those things are forms of congruency (since it actually does behave like that). we don't have those priors about the fractals.

UPDATE: is this just a simple rule -- "make the world look like what you want"? this might correspond to hierarchical action-unfolding. like if PFC representations are abstract goals/beliefs, and they're unfolded down the motor hierarchy by a constraint satisfaction settling process that checks forward models against how we want the senses to look.