A major part of vision research builds on the assumption that processing of visual stimuli can be understood on the basis of knowledge about the processing of simplified, artificial stimuli. Recent experimental advances, however, show that a combination of responses to simplified stimuli does not adequately describe responses to natural visual scenes. The systems performance exceeds the performance predicted from understanding its basic constituents. This highlights the fact that the visual system is specifically adapted to the properties of its everyday input and can only fully be understood when probed with naturalistic stimuli.