*Comment* **Dubious Claims about Simplicity and Likelihood: Comment on Pinna and Conti (2019)**

### **Peter A. van der Helm**

Department of Brain & Cognition, University of Leuven (K.U. Leuven), Tiensestraat 102-box 3711, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium; peter.vanderhelm@kuleuven.be

Received: 17 September 2019; Accepted: 13 January 2020; Published: 16 January 2020

**Abstract:** Pinna and Conti (*Brain Sci.*, 2019, *9*, 149, doi:10.3390/brainsci9060149) presented phenomena concerning the salience and role of contrast polarity in human visual perception, particularly in amodal completion. These phenomena are indeed illustrative thereof, but here, the focus is on their claims (1) that neither simplicity nor likelihood approaches can account for these phenomena; and (2) that simplicity and likelihood are equivalent. I argue that their first claim is based on incorrect assumptions, whereas their second claim is simply untrue.

**Keywords:** contrast polarity; perceptual organization; simplicity principle; likelihood principle; simplicity–likelihood equivalence; Bayes; classical information theory; modern information theory
