Type 2 blindsight and the nature of visual experience

Brogaard, Berit

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.09.017

Cited by 30 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Although this account may explain the very meager phenomenal content of visual imagery, it does not explain why visual imagery is not as glitzy, rich, and intense as a hand-on experience of, say, a beautifully colored mind-independent scene. A more plausible explanation for why mental imagery typically is fairly dull and lusterless in its phenomenal presence is that visual imagery is lacking in brightness and possibly also luminance contrast (for a review, see Brogaard, 2015). This is likely due to a lack of recruitment of early visual cortex in imagistic tasks as well as an inability to engage subcortical structures along the normal visual pathway.…”

Section: What Is Visual Imagery?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These findings suggest that the primary visual cortex (V1) plays a central role in computing brightness perception. The reason type 2 blindsight has a radically impoverished phenomenology compared to ordinary visual experience may thus be that it is accompanied by a loss of luminance awareness (Brogaard, 2015). It is likely that the loss in luminance awareness in type 2 blindsight emerges in a visual pathway that bypasses the primary visual cortex (V1) (see also Azzopardi and Hock, 2011).…”

Section: What Explains the Phenomenology Of Conscious Imagery?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although V1 is recruited, it appears to be recruited only when the imagery involves a representation of fine-grained spatial detail, for example, recalling whether a dog’s ears are pointy or floppy (Pearson et al, 2015). So, the lack of perception-like vividness of visual imagery may be due to a lack of sufficient processing of brightness in V1, which can lead to impoverished phenomenal content (Brogaard, 2015). This idea is consistent with the finding that the vividness of visual imagery seems to be strongly correlated with amount of activity in the early visual areas (Pearson et al, 2015).…”

Section: What Explains the Phenomenology Of Conscious Imagery?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unconscious Imagination and the Mental Imagery Debate

Brogaard

Gatzia

2017

Front. Psychol.

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Traditionally, philosophers have appealed to the phenomenological similarity between visual experience and visual imagery to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between the perceptual and imaginative domains. The current evidence, however, is inconclusive: while evidence from transcranial brain stimulation seems to support this conclusion, neurophysiological evidence from brain lesion studies (e.g., from patients with brain lesions resulting in a loss of mental imagery but not a corresponding loss of perception and vice versa) indicates that there are functional and anatomical dissociations between mental imagery and perception. Assuming that the mental imagery and perception do not overlap, at least, to the extent traditionally assumed, then the question arises as to what exactly mental imagery is and whether it parallels perception by proceeding via several functionally distinct mechanisms. In this review, we argue that even though there may not be a shared mechanism underlying vision for perception and conscious imagery, there is an overlap between the mechanisms underlying vision for action and unconscious visual imagery. On the basis of these findings, we propose a modification of Kosslyn’s model of imagery that accommodates unconscious imagination and explore possible explanations of the quasi-pictorial phenomenology of conscious visual imagery in light of the fact that its underlying neural substrates and mechanisms typically are distinct from those of visual experience.

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Section: What Is Visual Imagery?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What Explains the Phenomenology Of Conscious Imagery?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What Explains the Phenomenology Of Conscious Imagery?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unconscious Imagination and the Mental Imagery Debate

Brogaard

Gatzia

2017

Front. Psychol.

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“…However, given the nature of Brogaard's argument, which relies on the claim that certain forms of processing are necessary for a subject to be visually aware of visual information, this argument should also apply to type-2 conditions. In her more recent work, Brogaard accepts the claim that type-2 awareness is visual (see Brogaard, 2015), but I take it that this move requires rejecting the strong version of her earlier position as discussed here.…”

Section: Type-2 Blindsight As a Form Of Cognitive Awarenessmentioning

confidence: 75%

The case for characterising type-2 blindsight as a genuinely visual phenomenon

Foley

2015

Consciousness and Cognition

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“…According to Brogaard (2015), type-2 blindsight constitutes a counterexample to naïve realism because it is a case of veridical visual perception which nonetheless does not exhibit particularity, transparency, nor fine-grainedness. Type-2 blindsight differs from type-1 blindsight in that it involves residual awareness of the stimulus (hence it is not unconscious perception).…”

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confidence: 99%

Naïve realism about unconscious perception

Zięba

2017

Synthese

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Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it is possible that what is currently advocated as unconscious perception of the stimulus is in fact momentaneous perceptual awareness (or residual perceptual awareness) of the stimulus making the subject prone to judge in some way rather than another, or to act in some way rather than another. As to the apodosis, I show that neither the core of naïve realism nor any of its main motivations is undermined if SFK is assumed. On the contrary, certain incentives for endorsing naïve realism become more tempting on this assumption. Since the main motivations for naïve realism retain force under SFK, intentionalism is neither compulsory nor the best available explanation of unconscious perception.

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Type 2 blindsight and the nature of visual experience

Cited by 30 publications

References 69 publications

Unconscious Imagination and the Mental Imagery Debate

Unconscious Imagination and the Mental Imagery Debate

The case for characterising type-2 blindsight as a genuinely visual phenomenon

Naïve realism about unconscious perception

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