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Edward Adelson's Checkerboard Illusion. The visual system adjusts for the apparent differences in the spectral power distribution of the illuminant, which leads us to perceive A and B as differently colored.
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Is color experience cognitively penetrable? Some philosophers have recently argued that it is. In this paper, we take issue with the claim that color experience is cognitively penetrable. We argue that the notion of cognitive penetration that has recently dominated the literature is flawed since it fails to distinguish between the modulation of per...
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... (Cf. Deroy, 2013, on this point andGatzia, 2017b, for a different view.) Further evidence that memory color effects stem from within the visual system comes from a brain imaging study using "multivoxel pattern analysis, " a technique in which smallish individual volumes of cortex are analyzed jointly. ...
This book argues that there is a joint in nature between seeing and thinking, perception, and cognition. Perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual, and nonpropositional, whereas cognition does not have these properties constitutively. The book does not appeal to “intuitions,” as is common in philosophy, but to empirical evidence, including experiments in neuroscience and psychology. The book argues that cognition affects perception, i.e., that perception is cognitively penetrable, but that this does not impugn the joint in nature. A key part of the argument is that we perceive not only low-level properties like colors, shapes, and textures but also high-level properties such as faces and causation. Along the way, the book explains the difference between perception and perceptual memory, the differences between format and content, and whether perception is probabilistic despite our lack of awareness of probabilistic properties. The book argues for perceptual categories that are not concepts, that perception need not be singular, that perceptual attribution and perceptual discrimination are equally fundamental, and that basic features of the mind known as “core cognition” are not a third category in between perception and cognition. The chapter on consciousness leverages these results to argue against some of the most widely accepted theories of consciousness. Although only one chapter is about consciousness, much of the rest of the book repurposes work on consciousness to isolate the scientific basis of perception.
... This means that these experiments don't really show cognitive penetration, even if they show that color experience is affected, because this is likely not caused by beliefs or concepts (see alsoDeroy, 2013). 14 Other possibilities are suggested byDeroy (2013) andBrogaard and Gatzia (2017). Deroy argues that multi-modal representations containing all and only sensory information about objects can affect color experience. ...
... epresentations containing all and only sensory information about objects can affect color experience. These representations are assumed not to be conceptual, but they are not visual either, for they integrate information from all sensory modalities. On some views (suchFodor's and Pylyshyn's) this would probably still count as cognitive penetration.Brogaard and Gatzia (2017) suggest that color constancy could explain the effect, and so it would not qualify as a case of cognitive penetration.Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved. ...
I address the question of whether differences in color terminology cause differences in color experience in speakers of different languages. If linguistic representations directly affect color experience, then this is a case of what I call the linguistic penetrability of perception, which is a particular case of cognitive penetrability. I start with some general considerations about cognitive penetration and its alleged occurrence in the memory color effect. I then apply similar considerations to the interpretation of empirical studies of color perception in speakers of different languages. I argue that findings such as differences in categorical perception in speakers of different languages do not show that language affects color experience. They therefore do not support the claim that color experience is linguistically penetrable. But even if we grant that color experience is different in speakers of different languages, I argue that this might still not be a case of linguistic penetration. Finally, I consider some epistemological consequences of the assumption that speakers of different languages have different color experiences.
... In addition to giving people a visual aesthetic feeling, color also has profound importance in the cognition and emotion of individuals. Brogaard and Gatzia (2017) believe that the experience of color is related to factors of the cognitive system. Stone and English (1998) showed that different color environments in a workplace affected different levels of alertness in terms of work performance. ...
In order to study the aesthetic preferences of individuals in terms of wood color, the authors explored the preference for red sandalwood and wenge wood of different hues and lightness values through a combination of an eye movement technique and subjective evaluation. The experimental results showed that: (1) sex factors had a significant effect on the eye movement indexes in a modern aesthetic preference experiment; (2) the preferences of the subjects varied slightly with different wood types but in a lower range; and (3) the effective eye movement indexes in this study were fixation duration, number of fixations, and number of last-sampling positions; in addition, there were differences in the effective eye movement indicators in different experiments. The subjects preferred a low lightness value or color of the chair.
... Remarkably, CVS allows measurements of the space between vision and action that reflect the map introduced by CC in the previous section. Notably, CVS and CC agree that there are no shortcuts in the route linking the input to the output, moreover, they both suggest a one-way direction, making impossible any influence of the motoric processing on the 'encapsulated' content of (early) vision (see Brogaard and Gatzia 2017;Raftopoulos 2001Raftopoulos , 2014. ...
... Perceptual matching tasks such as these may also be less susceptible to alternative explanations based on differences in memory rather than perception (Cooper, Sterling, Bacon, & Bridgeman, 2012;Firestone & Scholl, 2015b), since they involve affirming the similarity of two currently visible stimuli. In light of these factors, and in light also of this classic study's prominence in contemporary debates over cognitive (im) penetrability (Brogaard & Gatzia, 2017;Deroy, 2013;Gatzia, 2017;Gross, Chaisilprungraung, Kaplan, Menendez, & Flombaum, 2014;Macpherson, 2012;Stokes, in press;Vetter & Newen, 2014;Zeimbekis, 2013), we asked whether this phenomenon might also be susceptible to a test of perceptual "logic". ...
... Suffice it for this editorial to say that our perception is not only related to the spectral properties of light, but also on "color-related beliefs, knowledge, and memory." 14 Our echocardiographic metrics are supposed to limit such subjectivity in the medical interpretation of CFD images. However, there is ample documented evidence that despite using metrics, substantial variability in how echocardiographic images are interpreted remains, even among experts. ...
... Perceptual matching tasks such as these may also be less susceptible to alternative explanations based on differences in memory rather than perception (Cooper et al., 2012;Firestone & Scholl, 2015b), since they involve affirming the similarity of two currently visible stimuli. In light of these factors, and in light also of this classic study's prominence in contemporary debates over cognitive (im)penetrability (Brogaard & Gatzia, 2017;Deroy, 2013;Gatzia, 2017;Gross et al., 2014;MacPherson, 2012;Stokes, in press;Vetter & Newen, 2014;Zeimbekis, 2013), we asked whether this phenomenon might also be susceptible to a test of perceptual "logic". ...
... But the fact is that we do not. Intra-perceptual principles appear to modulate the visual processes (Brogaard & Gatzia, 2017), completing the hidden parts of the occluded figure. These perceptual principles are not rational principles, such as maximum likelihood or semantic coherence. ...
In ‘The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning’ (this issue Chudnoff, E. forthcoming. “The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning.” Inquiry. [Google Scholar]) Elijah Chudnoff argues that cases from perceptual learning show that perception not only generates reasons for beliefs but also preserves those reasons over time in perceptual learning cases. In this paper, we dispute the idea that perceptual learning enables the preservation of perceptual reasons. We then argue for an alternative view, viz. the view that perceptual learning is epistemically significant insofar as it modifies our perceptual system in such a way as to make us capable of perceiving subtle low-level properties (e.g. lightness) and high-level properties (e.g. chess configurations). Acquiring the capacity to perceive these properties is what enables us to achieve expertise in a variety of subject matters (e.g. chicken sexing, chess playing, language fluency). Along the way, we argue against two main points in Chudnoff’s paper. The first is that, pace Chudnoff, perceptual learning does not result in the acquisition of new facts. It only results in the acquisition of a new perceptual capacity. The second is that experiences resulting from perceptual learning can always serve as immediate justifiers of beliefs and hence do not need supporting background information in order to serve as reasons.
... Just like the processes taking place in LGN or the primary visual cortex, which ultimately lead to a conscious experience, are not constitutive of the phenomenology of the experience, so sensorimotor know-how need not be constitutive of the phenomenology of experience. We can compare these dorsal-stream processes to the intra-perceptual principles or 'organizing principles of vision, ' that modulate early visual processes (Fodor, 1983;Pylyshyn, 1999;Raftopoulos, 2001;Brogaard and Gatzia, 2017). For example, in the case of amodal completion, partially occluded figures such as the polygon in the middle in Figure 1 are not perceived as the fragments of the foregrounded figures. ...
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.
... Attention can be allocated either by some bodily orientation of the organs by which an organism moves, say, when the eyes move in the direction of a target location (overt attention) or by shifting the direction of attention without reorienting the body, say, when attention is drawn by the salience of a cue while the eyes remain fixed (covert attention, see Findlay and Gilchrist, 2003). Cases that involve overt attention are not treated as cases of cognitive penetration because overt attention functions as a passive partition mechanism acting prior to the beginning of perceptual process (Pylyshyn, 1999;Macpherson, 2012;Deroy, 2013;Mole, 2015;Firestone and Scholl, 2016;Brogaard and Gatzia, 2017). Recently, however, it has been suggested that cases of covert attention are instances of cognitive penetration (Mole, 2015;Wu, in press) because covert attention functions as an active controlling influence of perceptual processing (Nanay, 2010;Carrasco, 2011Carrasco, , 2014. ...