Adults see vision to be more informative than it is

Abstract

Humans gain a wide range of knowledge through interacting with the environment. Each aspect of our perceptual experiences offers a unique source of information about the world—colours are seen, sounds heard and textures felt. Understanding how perceptual input provides a basis for knowledge is thus central to understanding one's own and others' epistemic states. Developmental research suggests that 5-year-olds have an immature understanding of knowledge sources and that they overestimate the knowledge to be gained from looking. Without evidence from adults, it is not clear whether the mature reasoning system outgrows this overestimation. The current study is the first to investigate whether an overestimation of the knowledge to be gained from vision occurs in adults. Novel response time paradigms were adapted from developmental studies. In two experiments, participants judged whether an object or feature could be identified by performing a specific action. Adult participants found it disproportionately easy to accept looking as a proposed action when it was informative, and difficult to reject looking when it was not informative. This suggests that adults, like children, overestimate the informativeness of vision. The origin of this overestimation and the implications that the current findings bear on the interpretation of children's overestimation are discussed.

Vision, knowledge, and assertion

“…It is obvious that what individuals see affects what they know. This obvious truth is reflected in classic philosophical theories of knowledge (Aristotle 350 BCE/1941;Locke 1690Locke /1975 and in the commonsense epistemology of children and adults (Pillow 1989;O'Neill, Astington & Flavell 1992;Robinson, Thomas, Parton & Nye 1997;Turri 2014a;Wang, Miletich, Ramsey & Samson 2014). Moreover, explicit knowledge judgments have important social consequences, suggesting that judgments about what someone sees might have similar consequences.…”

“…that something is not present or not happening). Another recent study investigated adults' attitudes about the relative effectiveness of different perceptual modalities to produce knowledge (Wang, Miletich, Ramsey & Samson 2014). Reaction time data suggested that adults think that looking is more informative than either touching or lifting, even when controlling for the appropriateness of sensory modality for acquiring information.…”

Choosing and refusing: doxastic voluntarism and folk psychology

“…One limitation of the previous experiment is that it focused only on inferential beliefs and treated evidence as a function of probability. However, some experimental work suggests that the source of evidence is a qualitative factor that can significantly affect some mental state attributions (O'Neill et al 1992;Wang et al 2014;Turri 2015a, b About half the time it snows here in Rochester during the winter, and today is a typical winter day. I am unsure whether it is snowing at the moment.…”

Measuring Mindreading: A Review of Behavioral Approaches to Testing Cognitive and Affective Mental State Attribution in Neurologically Typical Adults

“…Both children and adults demonstrate automatic egocentric bias in verbal and visual perspective-taking tasks (e.g., Epley et al, 2004), however, NT adults can partially correct for it (Wang et al, 2014). Belief-attribution, for example, has been shown to be non-automatic in adults (Back and Apperly, 2010).…”