Changing What You See by Changing What You Know: The Role of Attention

Abstract

Attending is a cognitive process that incorporates a person’s knowledge, goals, and expectations. What we perceive when we attend to one thing is different from what we perceive when we attend to something else. Yet, it is often argued that attentional effects do not count as evidence that perception is influenced by cognition. I investigate two arguments often given to justify excluding attention. The first is arguing that attention is a post-perceptual process reflecting selection between fully constructed perceptual representations. The second is arguing that attention as a pre-perceptual process that simply changes the input to encapsulated perceptual systems. Both of these arguments are highly problematic. Although some attentional effects can indeed be construed as post-perceptual, others operate by changing perceptual content across the entire visual hierarchy. Although there is a natural analogy between spatial attention and a change of input, the analogy falls apart when we consider other forms of attention. After dispelling these arguments, I make a case for thinking of attention not as a confound, but as one of the mechanisms by which cognitive states affect perception by going through cases in which the same or similar visual inputs are perceived differently depending on the observer’s cognitive state, and instances where cuing an observer using language affects what one sees. Lastly, I provide two compelling counter-examples to the critique that although cognitive influences on perception can be demonstrated in the laboratory, it is impossible to really experience them for oneself in a phenomenologically compelling way. Taken together, the current evidence strongly supports the thesis that what we know routinely influences what we see, that the same sensory input can be perceived differently depending on the current cognitive state of the viewer, and that phenomenologically salient demonstrations are possible if certain conditions are met.

From words-as-mappings to words-as-cues: the role of language in semantic knowledge

“…These early visual responses predicted behavioral categorization responses occurring half a second later. These results show that when requiring recognition of images at the level of basic categories, a label activates more categorical representations which allow for more efficient visual recognition of the image-a form of category-based attention (Lupyan, 2017). Further evidence that verbal labels elicit more categorical representations comes from the domain of color.…”

How reliable is perception?

“…To reiterate, allowing cognitive states to influence perceptual processing does not lead us to perceive what we expect. Rather, it changes our priors allowing for more effective inference (for further discussion of how the problem of incorporating knowledge into perception helps make perception better, see Hohwy, 2013;Lupyan, 2015aLupyan, , 2017.…”

“…As the above sections suggest, the thesis of cognitive penetrability is supported by considerable evidence. Attempts to discount this evidence by claiming that it is "merely" an effect of attention or that it "simply" shows one perceptual module affecting another rely on empirically questionable assumptions (Lupyan, 2015a(Lupyan, , 2016(Lupyan, , 2017.…”

“…For detailed discussions of why these effects cannot be explained away by the usual suspects such as "attention", "response biases", "memory", and "post-perceptual processing" 16 see (Lupyan, 2015a(Lupyan, , 2016(Lupyan, , 2017.…”

Conceptual knowledge affects early stages of visual mental imagery and object perception

“…The fact that we find the same knowledge effects on the P1 in imagery and perception also teaches us something relevant about perception. Recently, the debate if there are any true top-down effects on perception has sparked new controversy 25,[62][63][64] . Here we show semantic top-down influences on early visual processing in the absence of the relevant physical stimulus.…”