This brief review article brings together a series of related experiments in psychophysics and physiology that show striking similarities between measurements in human observers and in single neurons. We consider seven pairs of primary research articles, each pair consisting of one paper in physiology and one in psychophysics, and we highlight common features between receptive and perceptive fields obtained using reverse correlation. We conclude by discussing how to assess the validity of perceptive fields as predictors of human responses, and by deriving a novel expression for the maximum trial-by-trial predictability attainable by any model for any psychophysical task.