Cognitive Penetration and Attention

Abstract

Zenon Pylyshyn argues that cognitively driven attentional effects do not amount to cognitive penetration of early vision because such effects occur either before or after early vision. Critics object that in fact such effects occur at all levels of perceptual processing. We argue that Pylyshyn’s claim is correct—but not for the reason he emphasizes. Even if his critics are correct that attentional effects are not external to early vision, these effects do not satisfy Pylyshyn’s requirements that the effects be direct and exhibit semantic coherence. In addition, we distinguish our defense from those found in recent work by Raftopoulos and by Firestone and Scholl, argue that attention should not be assimilated to expectation, and discuss alternative characterizations of cognitive penetrability, advocating a kind of pluralism.

Naïve Realism and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception

“…A related idea has been defended by Zenon Pylyshyn, who first coined the term ‘cognitive penetration.’ Pylyshyn argues that cognitive penetration requires that beliefs have a “semantically coherent” (1999: 343) influence upon perception on the basis that causal influence is insufficient. While this idea has not gone unchallenged (Stokes ), it has been robustly defended by Fiona Macpherson (: 26; Macpherson : 9–10), and is often claimed to be partially definitive of the phenomenon (Brogaard and Gatzia ; Burnston ; Fridland ; Gross ; Lupyan ; Teng ; Wu ). In particular, Macpherson argues that the semantic coherence condition can help distinguish cases of cognitive penetration from cases like the following:…”

Neural decoding of bistable sounds reveals an effect of intention on perceptual organization

“…The processes that underlie integration and segregation are affected not only by these stimulus features but also by internal states of the listener, such as the degree to which they are attending to the sounds (Carlyon et al, 2001;Sussman et al, 2002;Snyder et al, 2006;Billig and Carlyon, 2015), and by whether the stimuli correspond to a familiar speaker (Johnsrude et al, 2013) or word (Billig et al, 2013). The extent to which observers can voluntarily influence how they perceptually organize the outside world is unclear and bears on questions of whether and how higher-level cognition can influence perception (Fodor, 1983;Pylyshyn, 1999;Firestone and Scholl, 2015;Gross, 2017;Lupyan, 2017).…”

Reading the bad news about our minds

“…44For some alternative approaches to setting up the issues, see Stokes (2012), Shea (2015), or Gross (2017). …”

“…77For an example of this point in the literature, see Firestone and Scholl (2016). For critical discussion of the point and of how strong a conclusion can be drawn from it, see Lupyan (2015), Gross (2017) or Green (forthcoming).…”