Fitting perception in and to cognition

Goldstone, Robert L.; Leeuw, Joshua de; Landy, David

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.11.027

Cited by 55 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Is what we perceive influenced by our current goals, knowledge, and expectations (e.g., Hohwy, 2013; Goldstone et al, 2015; Lupyan, 2015a; Teufel and Nanay, 2016)? Or is perception composed of encapsulated systems, following their own laws and logic, independent of what the perceiver knows and their current cognitive state (e.g., Pylyshyn, 1999; Orlandi, 2014; Firestone and Scholl, 2016)?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Lupyan

2017

Front. Psychol.

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Lupyan

2017

Front. Psychol.

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“…The first is that humans are capable of impressive feats of perceptual learning [85]. Quite a bit is known about some of the neurological underpinnings of these changes [86] and, as humans, we can systematically adapt our perceptual systems so as to provide more useful representations for downstream cognitive processes [75,87]. The second way in which humans can rise above their perceptual and cognitive constraints is by creating new measurement devices, experimental protocols, interactive technologies, and visualization algorithms to make otherwise invisible brain processes visible.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-portraits of the brain: cognitive science, data visualization, and communicating brain structure and function

Goldstone

Pestilli

Börner

2015

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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“…Recently, philosophers (Cecchi, 2014; Ogilivie and Carruthers, 2015) and cognitive scientists (Vetter and Newen, 2014; Goldstone et al, 2015; Lupyan, 2015) argued against my view that early vision is cognitively impenetrable on the ground that there is empirical evidence suggesting that cognitively driven object/feature-based and spatial attention modulate perceptual processing during early vision. Many studies show that when subjects are instructed to attend to a certain location or attend for a certain object/feature to appear, the neuronal assemblies in the visual brain whose receptive fields are within the attended location, or the neuronal assemblies that encode the feature indicated by these instructions receive a boost in their activation as a result of these instructions and this boost occurs before the appearance of the stimulus.…”

Section: Early Vision and Pre-cueingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has been recently argued by philosophers (Cecchi, 2014; Ogilivie and Carruthers, 2015) and cognitive scientists (Vetter and Newen, 2014; Goldstone et al, 2015; Lupyan, 2015) that various pre-cueing attentional effects directly modulate early visual processing itself, in that the signatures of these effects are found within early vision, and since these effects involve cognition, early vision is cognitively penetrated. Fazekas and Nanay (2017) note that if pre-cueing is construed as the expression of cognition driving attention, it would be easy for a defender of the cognitive penetrability of early vision to counteract that pre-cueing is an indirect cognitive effect that, as such, does not entail that early vision is cognitively penetrated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pre-cueing, the Epistemic Role of Early Vision, and the Cognitive Impenetrability of Early Vision

Raftopoulos

2017

Front. Psychol.

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I have argued (Raftopoulos, 2009, 2014) that early vision is not directly affected by cognition since its processes do not draw on cognition as an informational resource; early vision processes do not operate over cognitive contents, which is the essence of the claim that perception is cognitively penetrated; early vision is cognitively impenetrable. Recently it has been argued that there are cognitive effects that affect early vision, such as the various pre-cueing effects guided by cognitively driven attention, which suggests that early vision is cognitively penetrated. In addition, since the signatures of these effects are found in early vision it seems that early vision is directly affected by cognition since its processes seem to use cognitive information. I defend the cognitive impenetrability of early vision in three steps. First, I discuss the problems the cognitively penetrability of perception causes for the epistemic role of perception in grounding perceptual beliefs. Second, I argue that whether a set of perceptual processes is cognitively penetrated hinges on whether there are cognitive effects that undermine the justificatory role of these processes in grounding empirical beliefs, and I examine the epistemic role of early vision. I argue, third, that the cognitive effects that act through pre-cueing do not undermine this role and, thus, do not render early vision cognitively penetrable. In addition, they do not entail that early vision uses cognitive information.

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Fitting perception in and to cognition

Cited by 55 publications

References 35 publications

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

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

Self-portraits of the brain: cognitive science, data visualization, and communicating brain structure and function

Pre-cueing, the Epistemic Role of Early Vision, and the Cognitive Impenetrability of Early Vision

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