Spontaneous perception: a framework for task-free, self-paced perception

Abstract

Flipping through social media feeds, viewing exhibitions in a museum, or walking through the botanical gardens, people consistently choose to engage with and disengage from visual content. Yet, in most laboratory settings, the visual stimuli, their presentation duration, and the task at hand are all controlled by the researcher. Such settings largely overlook the spontaneous nature of human visual experience, in which perception takes place independently from specific task constraints and its time course is determined by the observer as a self-governing agent. Currently, much remains unknown about how spontaneous perceptual experiences unfold in the brain. Are all perceptual categories extracted during spontaneous perception? Does spontaneous perception inherently involve volition? Is spontaneous perception segmented into discrete episodes? How do different neural networks interact over time during spontaneous perception? These questions are imperative to understand our conscious visual experience in daily life. In this article we propose a framework for spontaneous perception. We first define spontaneous perception as a task-free and self-paced experience. We propose that spontaneous perception is guided by four organizing principles that grant it temporal and spatial structures. These principles include coarse-to-fine processing, continuity and segmentation, agency and volition, and associative processing. We provide key suggestions illustrating how these principles may interact with one another in guiding the multifaceted experience of spontaneous perception. We point to testable predictions derived from this framework, including (but not limited to) the roles of the default-mode network and slow cortical potentials in underlying spontaneous perception. We conclude by suggesting several outstanding questions for future research, extending the relevance of this framework to consciousness and spontaneous brain activity. In conclusion, the spontaneous perception framework proposed herein integrates components in human perception and cognition, which have been traditionally studied in isolation, and opens the door to understand how visual perception unfolds in its most natural context.

Seeing social: A neural signature for conscious perception of social interactions

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The Infertility Trap: The Fertility Costs of Group-Living in Mammalian Social Evolution

“…These social cognitive abilities are significantly more costly in neural processing terms than conventional causal reasoning and memory processes (Powell et al, 2010;Lewis et al, 2017). They also require a large dedicated neural network (the combined mentalising/default mode neural network, comprising units in the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes, plus the limbic system: Sallet et al, 2013;Mars et al, 2016;Spreng et al, 2020) as well as specific brain regions such as the frontal pole (Brodmann Area 10) that are only found in anthropoid primates (Passingham and Wise, 2012). Neuroimaging studies of both humans (Bickart et al, 2011(Bickart et al, , 2012Lewis et al, 2011;Kanai et al, 2012;Powell et al, 2012;von der Heide et al, 2014;Hampton et al, 2016;Sliwa and Freiwald, 2017;Krol et al, 2018;Kwak et al, 2018;Noonan et al, 2018;Spagna et al, 2018;Kiesow et al, 2020) and anthropoid primates (Sallet et al, 2011;Meguerditchian et al, 2020) indicate that the size of an individuals' personal social network (or living group) correlates with the volume of its mentalising and default mode networks and their associated white matter tracts.…”