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Is visual perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer illusion and the Cultural Byproduct Hypothesis
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Abstract
A fundamental question in the psychological sciences is the degree to which culture shapes core cognitive processes — perhaps none more foundational than how we perceive the world around us. A dramatic and oft-cited “case study” of culture’s power in this regard is the Müller-Lyer illusion, which depicts two lines of equal length but with arrowheads pointing either inward or outward, creating the illusion that one line is longer than the other. According to a line of research stretching back over a century, depending on the society you were raised in (and how much carpentry you were exposed to), you may not see the illusion at all — an ambitious and influential research program motivating claims that seemingly basic aspects of visual processing may actually be “culturally evolved byproducts”. This Cultural Byproduct Hypothesis bears on foundational issues in the science, philosophy, and sociology of psychology, and remains popular today. Yet, here we argue that it is almost certainly false. We synthesize evidence from diverse fields which demonstrate that: (1) the illusion is not limited to humans, appearing in non-human animals from diverse ecologies; (2) the statistics of natural scenes are sufficient to capture the illusion; (3) the illusion does not require straight lines typical of carpentry (nor even any lines at all); (4) the illusion arises in sense modalities other than vision; and (5) the illusion arises even in congenitally blind subjects. Moreover, by reexamining historical data and ethnographic descriptions from the original case studies, we show that the evidence for cultural variation and its correlation with key cultural variables is in fact highly inconsistent, beset by questionable research practices, and misreported by later discussions. Together, these considerations undermine the most popular and dramatic example of cultural influence on perception. We further extend our case beyond this phenomenon, showing that many of these considerations apply to other visual illusions as well, including similarly implicated visual phenomena such as the Ebbinghaus, Ponzo, Poggendorf, and Horizontal-Vertical illusions. We conclude by outlining future approaches to cross-cultural research on perception, and we also point to other potential sources of cultural variation in visual processing.
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Most studies in psychology, neuroscience, and life science research make inferences about how strong an effect is on average in the population. Yet, many research questions could instead be answered by testing for the universality of the phenomenon under investigation. By using reliable experimental designs that maximise both sensitivity and specificity of individual experiments, each participant or subject can be treated as an independent replication. This approach is common in certain subfields. To date, there is however no formal approach for calculating the evidential value of such small sample studies and to define a priori evidence thresholds that must be met to draw meaningful conclusions. Here we present such a framework, based on the ratio of binomial probabilities between a model assuming the universality of the phenomenon versus the null hypothesis that any incidence of the effect is sporadic. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach, which permits strong conclusions from samples as small as 2-5 participants and the flexibility of sequential testing. This approach will enable researchers to preregister experimental designs based on small samples and thus enhance the utility and credibility of such studies.
The Bouba-Kiki effect is the systematic mapping between round/spiky shapes and speech sounds (“Bouba”/“Kiki”). In the size-weight illusion, participants judge the smaller of two equally-weighted objects as being heavier. Here we investigated the contribution of visual experience to the development of these phenomena. We compared three groups: early blind individuals (no visual experience), individuals treated for congenital cataracts years after birth (late visual experience), and typically sighted controls (visual experience from birth). We found that, in cataract-treated participants (tested visually/visuo-haptically), both phenomena are absent shortly after sight onset, just like in blind individuals (tested haptically). However, they emerge within months following surgery, becoming statistically indistinguishable from the sighted controls. This suggests a pivotal role of visual experience and refutes the existence of an early sensitive period: A short period of experience, even when gained only years after birth, is sufficient for participants to visually pick-up regularities in the environment, contributing to the development of these phenomena.
In recent research of culture and ethnicity in visual perception, some researchers have found support for the hypothesis that more collectivistic cultures tend to be more influenced by surrounding contextual visual information than more individualistic cultures. This hypothesis suggests that even low-level visual perception may not be universal and has great implications on how vision research should be conducted. The current study reexamines this hypothesis in the rod and frame task, which tests the influence of a tilted contextual frame on orientation perception of the rod. We found no difference between participants of East Asian and Western European descent in this task. Despite not finding the cultural effect, we found a well-reported gender effect in which women were more influenced by the tilt of the frame than men, helping to ensure the quality of the data collected. Our results suggest that contextual influence on visual perception does not affect East Asians and white Western Europeans differently.
A Müller-Lyer figure consists only of a line and arrowheads located at both ends of the line. Many comparative studies have reported that animals perceive Müller-Lyer illusion as humans, but few have used appropriate experimental designs to verify whether animal subjects actually respond to line length alone. The present study investigated whether budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) can perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion by using a method that addresses this problem. Four budgerigars were trained to select a long or short line (counterbalanced across subjects) from two horizontal lines. Next, the same task was conducted using two lines, one of which was situated between arrowheads pointing either right (>>) or left (<<). In the final training phase, the arrowheads were replaced with those pointing inward (><) or outward (<>). The performance of each subject toward each stimulus set of these trainings suggested that they did not determine the length of the line by including the arrowheads. In the test phase, response tendencies to the four figures were compared. Results suggested that budgerigars perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion in the same direction as humans; however, its magnitude is larger than that of humans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Animals travelling in their natural environment repeatedly encounter obstacles that they can either detour or go through. Gap negotiation requires an accurate estimation of the opening's size to avoid getting stuck or being injured. Research on visual illusions has revealed that in some circumstances, transformation rules used to generate a three-dimensional representation from bidimensional retinal images fail, leading to systematic errors in perception. In Ebbinghaus and Delboeuf illusions, the presence of task-irrelevant elements causes us to misjudge an object's size. Susceptibility to these illusions was observed in other animals, although with large intraspecific differences. In this study, we investigated whether fish can accurately estimate gap size and whether during this process they may be deceived by illusory patterns. Guppies were extremely accurate in gap negotiation, discriminating holes with a 10% diameter difference. When presented with two identical holes surrounded by inducers to produce Ebbinghaus and Delboeuf patterns, guppies misperceived gap size in the predicted direction. So far, researchers have principally considered illusions as useful tools for exploring the cognitive processing underlying vision. Our findings highlight the possibility that they have important ecological implications, affecting the everyday interactions of an animal with its physical world besides its intra- and interspecific relationships.
Cross-cultural research on moral reasoning has brought to the fore the question of whether moral judgements always turn on inferences about the mental states of others. Formal legal systems for assigning blame and punishment typically make fine-grained distinctions about mental states, as illustrated by the concept of mens rea , and experimental studies in the USA and elsewhere suggest everyday moral judgements also make use of such distinctions. On the other hand, anthropologists have suggested that some societies have a morality that is disregarding of mental states, and have marshalled ethnographic and experimental evidence in support of this claim. Here, we argue against the claim that some societies are simply less ‘mind-minded’ than others about morality. In place of this cultural main effects hypothesis about the role of mindreading in morality, we propose a contextual variability view in which the role of mental states in moral judgement depends on the context and the reasons for judgement. On this view, which mental states are or are not relevant for a judgement is context-specific, and what appear to be cultural main effects are better explained by culture-by-context interactions.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.
Myopia (near-sightedness) is an important public health issue. Spending more time outdoors can prevent myopia but the long-term association between this exposure and myopia has not been well characterised. We investigated the relationship between time spent outdoors in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood and risk of myopia in young adulthood. The Kidskin Young Adult Myopia Study (KYAMS) was a follow-up of the Kidskin Study, a sun exposure-intervention study of 1776 children aged 6–12 years. Myopia status was assessed in 303 (17.6%) KYAMS participants (aged 25–30 years) and several subjective and objective measures of time spent outdoors were collected in childhood (8–12 years) and adulthood. Index measures of total, childhood and recent time spent outdoors were developed using confirmatory factor analysis. Logistic regression was used to assess the association between a 0.1-unit change in the time outdoor indices and risk of myopia after adjusting for sex, education, outdoor occupation, parental myopia, parental education, ancestry and Kidskin Study intervention group. Spending more time outdoors during childhood was associated with reduced risk of myopia in young adulthood (multivariable odds ratio [OR] 0.82, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.69, 0.98). Spending more time outdoors in later adolescence and young adulthood was associated with reduced risk of late-onset myopia (≥ 15 years of age, multivariable OR 0.79, 95% CI 0.64, 0.98). Spending more time outdoors in both childhood and adolescence was associated with less myopia in young adulthood.
There is growing interest in how human observers perceive social scenes containing multiple people. Interpersonal distance is a critical feature when appraising these scenes; proxemic cues are used by observers to infer whether two people are interacting, the nature of their relationship, and the valence of their current interaction. Presently, however, remarkably little is known about how interpersonal distance is encoded within the human visual system. Here we show that the perception of interpersonal distance is distorted by the Müller-Lyer illusion. Participants perceived the distance between two target points to be compressed or expanded depending on whether face pairs were positioned inside or outside the to-be-judged interval. This illusory bias was found to be unaffected by manipulations of face direction. These findings aid our understanding of how human observers perceive interpersonal distance and may inform theoretical accounts of the Müller-Lyer illusion.
Henrich et al. (2010) highlighted the necessity of broadening the range of regions for cross-cultural investigation in their seminal paper “The weirdest people in the world.” They criticize the current psychological framework for relying dominantly on American undergraduate students for their participant database, and state that there is a risk associated with investigating human nature by focusing solely on a unique population. This line of research has, over the past 30 years, successfully demonstrated the diversity of human cognition. However, it is true that there are still only a limited number of studies that have extended their geographical regions of research outside of G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States) and G20 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, EU countries, and the above G7 countries). In order to fully examine the issue of culture and cognition, we maintain that the field of psychology must extend its research globally. In this paper, we will briefly discuss the history of cross-cultural research in the 1960s which can be seen as the beginning of addressing the above concerns, and review some contemporary empirical studies which took over their 1960s predecessors’ mission. Here we address three strengths of extending the geographical scope to advance cultural psychology. In the second half of the paper, we will introduce our preliminary study conducted in Mongolia as a sample case study to demonstrate a way of administering cultural psychological research outside of the existing research field. We will then discuss implications of this line of research, and provide tips on how to open a new research site.
The horizontal-vertical (HV) illusion is characterized by a tendency to overestimate the length of vertically-arranged objects. Comparative research is primarily confined to primates, a range of species that, although arboreal, often explore their environment moving along the horizontal axis. Such behaviour may have led to the development of asymmetrical perceptual mechanisms to make relative size judgments of objects placed vertically and horizontally. We observed the susceptibility to the HV illusion in fish, whose ability to swim along the horizontal and vertical plane permits them to scan objects’ size equally on both axes. Guppies (Poecilia reticulata) were trained to select the longer orange line to receive a food reward. In the test phase, two arrays, containing two same-sized lines were presented, one horizontally and the other vertically. Black lines were also included in each pattern to generate the perception of an inverted T-shape (where a horizontal line is bisected by a vertical one) or an L-shape (no bisection). No bias was observed in the L-shape, which supports the idea of differential perceptual mechanisms for primates and fish. In the inverted T-shape, guppies estimated the bisected line as shorter, providing the first evidence of a length bisection bias in a fish species.
Visual illusions have been widely used to compare visual perception among birds and mammals to assess whether animals interpret and alter visual inputs like humans, or if they detect them with little or no variability. Here, we investigated whether a nonavian reptile (Pogona vitticeps) perceives the Müller-Lyer illusion, an illusion that causes a misperception of the relative length of 2 line segments. We observed the animals' spontaneous tendency to choose the larger food quantity (the longer line). In test trials, animals received the same food quantity presented in a spatial arrangement eliciting the size illusion in humans; control trials presented them with 2 different-sized food portions. Bearded dragons significantly selected the larger food quantity in control trials, confirming that they maximized food intake. Group analysis revealed that in the illusory test trials, they preferentially selected the line length estimated as longer by human observers. Further control trials excluded the possibility that their choice was based on potential spatial bias related to the illusory pattern. Our study suggests that a nonavian reptile species has the capability to be sensitive to the Müller-Lyer illusion, raising the intriguing possibility that the perceptual mechanisms underlying size estimation might be similar across amniotes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
The covariance structure of personality traits derived from statistical models (for example, Big Five) is often assumed to be a human universal. Cross-cultural studies have challenged this view, finding that less-complex societies exhibit stronger covariation among behavioural characteristics, resulting in fewer derived personality factors. To explain these results, we propose the niche diversity hypothesis, in which a greater diversity of social and ecological niches elicits a broader range of multivariate behavioural profiles and, hence, lower trait covariance in a population. We formalize this as a computational model, which reproduces empirical results from recent cross-cultural studies and also yields an additional prediction for which we find empirical support. This work provides a general explanation for population differences in personality structure in both humans and other animals and suggests a substantial reimagining of personality research: instead of reifying statistical descriptions of manifest personality structures, research should focus more on modelling their underlying causes.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is a well-known distortion illusion that occurs when the spatial arrangement of inducers (i.e. inwards- or outwards-pointing arrowheads) influences a line’s perceived relative length. To date, this illusion has been reported in several animal species but only in one teleost fish (i.e. redtail splitfins Xenotoca eiseni), although teleost fish represent approximately 50% of vertebrate diversity. We investigated the perception of this illusion in another teleost fish: guppies Poecilia reticulata, a species that diverged from the redtail splitfin 65 million years ago. The guppies were trained to select the longer between two lines; after meeting the learning criterion, illusory trials were presented. Controls trials were also arranged to exclude the possibility that their choices were based on potential spatial biases that relate to the illusory pattern. The guppies’ overall performance indicated that they were susceptible to the Müller-Lyer illusion, perceiving the line with the inwards-pointing arrowheads as longer. The performance in the control trials excluded the possibility that the subjects used the physical differences between the two figures as the discriminative cue in the illusory trials. Our study suggests that sensibility to the Müller-Lyer illusion could be widespread across teleost fish and reinforces the idea that the perceptual mechanisms underlying size estimation might be similar across vertebrates.
Visual illusions are objects that are made up of elements that are arranged in such a way as to result in erroneous perception of the objects’ physical properties. Visual illusions are used to study visual perception in humans and nonhuman animals, since they provide insight into the psychological and cognitive processes underlying the perceptual system. In a set of three experiments, we examined whether dogs were able to learn a relational discrimination and to perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion. In Experiment 1, dogs were trained to discriminate line lengths using a two-alternative forced choice procedure on a touchscreen. Upon learning the discrimination, dogs’ generalization to novel exemplars and the threshold of their abilities were tested. In the second experiment, dogs were presented with the Müller-Lyer illusion as test trials, alongside additional test trials that controlled for overall stimulus size. Dogs appeared to perceive the illusion; however, control trials revealed that they were using global size to solve the task. Experiment 3 presented modified stimuli that have been known to enhance perception of the illusion in other species. However, the dogs’ performance remained the same. These findings reveal evidence of relational learning in dogs. However, their failure to perceive the illusion emphasizes the importance of using a full array of control trials when examining these paradigms, and it suggests that visual acuity may play a crucial role in this perceptual phenomenon.
The ultimate theoretical and even ethnographic goals of anthropology depend on a mature
conception of mental and embodied processes and a fully realized theory of knowledge and
enculturation of experience. Anthropology has been in dialogue with allied disciplines,
including psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, and many of the greatest anthropologists
have made psychological questions part of, if not the key to, their work. Psychological
Anthropology
for the 21st Century provides a detailed survey of the intimate and enduring
relationship between anthropology and psychology. Charting the developments, celebrating
the accomplishments, and critiquing the inadequacies of the subdiscipline, Eller aims to
communicate the exciting and important achievements in the study of cultural influences
and variations in thought, emotion, and experience. Combining history and theory with
robust ethnography, Eller clearly lays out the central role that psychological anthropology
has played and continues to play in the discipline and should be essential reading for all
students new to the study of psychological anthropology.
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.
The designing, collecting, analyzing, and reporting of psychological studies entail many choices that are often arbitrary. The opportunistic use of these so-called researcher degrees of freedom aimed at obtaining statistically significant results is problematic because it enhances the chances of false positive results and may inflate effect size estimates. In this review article, we present an extensive list of 34 degrees of freedom that researchers have in formulating hypotheses, and in designing, running, analyzing, and reporting of psychological research. The list can be used in research methods education, and as a checklist to assess the quality of preregistrations and to determine the potential for bias due to (arbitrary) choices in unregistered studies.
In humans, geometrical illusions are thought to reflect mechanisms that are usually helpful for seeing the world in a predictable manner. These mechanisms deceive us given the right set of circumstances, correcting visual input where a correction is not necessary. Investigations of non-human animals’ susceptibility to geometrical illusions have yielded contradictory results, suggesting that the underlying mechanisms with which animals see the world may differ across species. In this review, we first collate studies showing that different species are susceptible to specific illusions in the same or reverse direction as humans. Based on a careful assessment of these findings, we then propose several ecological and anatomical factors that may affect how a species perceives illusory stimuli. We also consider the usefulness of this information for determining whether sight in different species might be more similar to human sight, being influenced by contextual information, or to how machines process and transmit information as programmed. Future testing in animals could provide new theoretical insights by focusing on establishing dissociations between stimuli that may or may not alter perception in a particular species. This information could improve our understanding of the mechanisms behind illusions, but also provide insight into how sight is subjectively experienced by different animals, and the degree to which vision is innate versus acquired, which is difficult to examine in humans.
Congenital cataract (CC) is the primary cause of treatable childhood blindness worldwide. The establishment of reliable, epidemiological estimates is an essential first step towards management strategies. We undertook an initial systematic review and meta-analysis to estimate the prevalence and other epidemiological characteristics of CC. PubMed, Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and Cochrane Library were searched before January 2015. A meta-analysis with random-effects model based on a proportions approach was performed to determine the population-based prevalence of CC and to describe the data regarding the laterality, morphology, associated comorbidities and etiology. Heterogeneity was analyzed using the meta-regression method, and subgroup analyses were performed. 27 studies were selected from 2,610 references. The pooled prevalence estimate was 4.24 per 10,000 people, making it a rare disease based on WHO standards. Subgroup analyses revealed the highest CC prevalence in Asia, and an increasing prevalence trend through 2000. Other epidemiological characteristics showed CC tended to be bilateral, isolated, hereditary and in total/nuclear morphology. Huge heterogeneity was identified across most estimates (I2 > 75%). Most of the variations could be explained by sample size, research period and age at diagnosis. The findings provide suggestions for etiology of CC, improvements in screening techniques and development of public health strategies.
To what extent is cognition influenced by a person’s cultural background? This question has remained controversial in large fields of the cognitive sciences, including cognitive psychology, and is also underexplored in anthropology. In this perspective article, findings from a recent wave of cross-cultural studies will be outlined with respect to three aspects of cognition: perception and categorization, number representation and counting, and explanatory frameworks and beliefs. Identifying similarities and differences between these domains allows for general conclusions regarding cognitive diversity and helps to highlight the importance of culturally shaped content for a comprehensive understanding of cognition.
The development of visual context effects in the Ebbinghaus illusion in the United Kingdom and in remote
and urban Namibians (UN) was investigated (N = 336). Remote traditional Himba children showed no illusion
up until 9–10 years, whereas UK children showed a robust illusion from 7 to 8 years of age. Greater illusion
in UK than in traditional Himba children was stable from 9 to 10 years to adulthood. A lesser illusion was seen in remote traditional Himba children than in UN children growing up in the nearest town to the traditional Himba villages across age groups. We conclude that cross-cultural differences in perceptual biases to process visual context emerge in early childhood and are influenced by the urban environment.
Myopia has a multifactorial etiology, although environmental factors are predominant in determining its current patterns. Currently, associations between near work activities and myopia have not been consistently observed. Therefore, we performed a systematic review to quantify the effect of near work activities on myopia in children. Relevant articles published between 1989 and 2014 were identified in MEDLINE, Embase, and the Cochrane Library, and the citation lists were reviewed. Twelve cohort studies and 15 cross-sectional studies were included (25,025 children aged between 6 and 18 years). The I2 statistic was used to assess heterogeneity. Study-level data were pooled using a random-effects model or a fixed-effects model (when less than 5 studies were included). We found that more time spent on near work activities was associated with higher odds of myopia (odds ratio [OR] = 1.14; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.08-1.20) and that the odds of myopia increased by 2% (OR:1.02; 95% CI = 1.01-1.03) for every one diopter-hour (hr) more of near work per week. Therefore, the development of a strategy to reduce the impact of near work on myopia would be important for preventing myopia in children.
Empirically analyzing empirical evidence
One of the central goals in any scientific endeavor is to understand causality. Experiments that seek to demonstrate a cause/effect relation most often manipulate the postulated causal factor. Aarts et al. describe the replication of 100 experiments reported in papers published in 2008 in three high-ranking psychology journals. Assessing whether the replication and the original experiment yielded the same result according to several criteria, they find that about one-third to one-half of the original findings were also observed in the replication study.
Science , this issue 10.1126/science.aac4716
What determines what we see? In contrast to the traditional “modular” understanding of perception, according to which visual processing is encapsulated from higher-level cognition, a tidal wave of recent research alleges that states such as beliefs, desires, emotions, motivations, intentions, and linguistic representations exert direct top-down influences on what we see. There is a growing consensus that such effects are ubiquitous, and that the distinction between perception and cognition may itself be unsustainable. We argue otherwise: none of these hundreds of studies — either individually or collectively — provide compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or “cognitive penetrability”. In particular, and despite their variety, we suggest that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls. And whereas abstract theoretical challenges have failed to resolve this debate in the past, our presentation of these pitfalls is empirically anchored: in each case, we show not only how certain studies
could
be susceptible to the pitfall (in principle), but how several alleged top-down effects
actually are
explained by the pitfall (in practice). Moreover, these pitfalls are perfectly general, with each applying to dozens of other top-down effects. We conclude by extracting the lessons provided by these pitfalls into a checklist that future work could use to convincingly demonstrate top-down effects on visual perception. The discovery of substantive top-down effects of cognition on perception would revolutionize our understanding of how the mind is organized; but without addressing these pitfalls, no such empirical report will license such exciting conclusions.
The illusory letters phenomenon (ILP) is a unique demonstration that words can be perceived as complete even when letters are physically absent. However, the ILP has only ever been reported for a Latinate language (English), and it is unknown whether the illusion occurs for alphabetic languages with fundamentally different visual properties. Here we report a demonstration of the ILP for Arabic in which stimuli containing only the exterior letters of three-letter Arabic words and a nonsense pattern in the interior position were presented to fluent Arabic readers. Despite being incomplete, participants perceived these stimuli as complete Arabic words with all letters visible in their appropriate positions, and were unable to distinguish between illusory and normal displays. This finding provides an important extension of the original ILP and suggests that alphabetic languages may be widely susceptible to the phenomenon and reading generally may occur as a process augmented by illusory percepts.
The dominant accounts of many visual illusions are based on experience-driven development of sensitivity to certain visual cues. According to such accounts, learned associations between observed two-dimensional cues (say, converging lines) and the real three-dimensional structures they represent (a surface receding in depth) render us susceptible to misperceiving some images that are cleverly contrived to contain those two-dimensional cues. While this explanation appears reasonable, it lacks direct experimental validation. To contrast it with an account that dispenses with the need for visual experience, it is necessary to determine whether susceptibility to the illusion is present immediately after birth; however, eliciting reliable responses from newborns is fraught with operational difficulties, and studies with older infants are incapable of resolving this issue. Our work with children who gain sight after extended early-onset blindness, as part of Project Prakash, provides a potential way forward. We report here that the newly sighted children, ranging in age from 8 through 16 years, exhibit susceptibility to two well-known geometrical visual illusions, Ponzo [1] and Müller-Lyer [2], immediately after the onset of sight. This finding has implications not only for the likely explanations of these illusions, but more generally, for the nature-nurture argument as it relates to some key aspects of visual processing.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Culture shapes higher-level processes such as norms and reasoning styles. The extent to which culture affects more low-level, automatic mental processes remains largely unknown. Here we show stark cross-cultural differences in perception of the Coffer visual illusion, which contains two percepts: rectangles and circles. Our data reveal that 97% of US and UK participants see only rectangles or rectangles first, but 96% of Namibian Himba participants from traditional villages see only circles or circles first. How we see the world may be shaped by exposure to right-angled stimuli across an urban-rural gradient. These results have implications for research relying overwhelmingly on participants (human, machine, non-human animal) exposed to highly carpentered environments (urban environments for humans and machine training datasets, cages/aquaria for non-human animals).
This study synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new and exciting theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory and information flow; Fodor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organization underlying biologically coherent behaviors. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of faculty psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artificial intelligence.
Bradford Books imprint
New essays on the philosophy of Ned Block, with substantive and wide-ranging responses by Block.
Perhaps more than any other philosopher of mind, Ned Block synthesizes philosophical and scientific approaches to the mind; he is unique in moving back and forth across this divide, doing so with creativity and intensity. Over the course of his career, Block has made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of intelligence, representation, and consciousness. Blockheads! (the title refers to Block's imaginary counterexample to the Turing test—and to the Block-enthusiast contributors) offers eighteen new essays on Block's work along with substantive and wide-ranging replies by Block. The essays and responses not only address Block's past contributions but are rich with new ideas and argument. They importantly clarify many key elements of Block's work, including his pessimism concerning such thought experiments as Commander Data and the Nation of China; his more general pessimism about intuitions and introspection in the philosophy of mind; the empirical case for an antifunctionalist, biological theory of phenomenal consciousness; the fading qualia problem for a biological theory; the link between phenomenal consciousness and representation (especially spatial representation); and the reducibility of phenomenal representation. Many of the contributors to Blockheads! are prominent philosophers themselves, including Tyler Burge, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, and Hilary Putnam.
ContributorsNed Block, Bill Brewer, Richard Brown, Tyler Burge, Marisa Carrasco, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Hakwan Lau, Geoffrey Lee, Janet Levin, Joseph Levine, William G. Lycan, Brian P. McLaughlin, Adam Pautz, Hilary Putnam, Sydney Shoemaker, Susanna Siegel, Nicholas Silins, Daniel Stoljar, Michael Tye, Sebastian Watzl
Cultural differences between the US and China have been investigated using a broad array of psychological tasks measuring differences between cognition, language, perception, and reasoning. We examine the robustness of several classic experimental paradigms in cross-cultural psychology. Using online convenience samples of adults, we conducted two large-scale replications of 12 tasks previously reported to show cross-cultural differences. Our results showed a heterogeneous pattern of successes and failures: five tasks yielded robust cultural differences across both experiments, while six showed no difference between cultures, and one showed a small difference in the opposite direction. We observed moderate reliability in all of the multi-trial tasks, but there was little shared variation between tasks. Additionally, we did not see within-culture variation across a range of demographic factors in our samples. Finally, as in prior work, cross-cultural differences in cognition (in those tasks showing differences) were not strongly related to explicit measures of cultural identity and behavior. All of our tasks, data, and analyses are available openly online for reuse by future researchers, providing a foundation for future studies that seek to establish a robust and replicable science of cross-cultural difference.
In this paper, we argue that adopting an inclusive approach where diverse cultures are represented in research is of prime importance for cognitive psychology. The overrepresentation of participant samples and researchers from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultures limits the generalizability of findings and fails to capture potential sources of variability, impeding understanding of human cognition. In an analysis of articles in representative cognitive psychology journals over the five-year period of 2016–2020, we find that only approximately 7% of articles consider culture, broadly defined. Of these articles, a majority (83%) focus on language or bilingualism, with small numbers of articles considering other aspects of culture. We argue that methodology and theory developed in the last century of cognitive research not only can be leveraged, but will be enriched by greater diversity in both populations and researchers. Such advances pave the way to uncover cognitive processes that may be universal or systematically differ as a function of cultural variations, and the individual differences in relation to cultural variations. To make a case for broadening this scope, we characterize relevant cross-cultural research, sample classic cognitive research that is congruent with such an approach, and discuss compatibility between a cross-cultural perspective and the classic tenets of cognitive psychology. We make recommendations for large and small steps for the field to incorporate greater cultural representation in the study of cognition, while recognizing the challenges associated with these efforts and acknowledging that not every research question calls for a cross-cultural perspective.
Cross-cultural psychology has come of age as a scientific discipline, but how has it developed? The field has moved from exploratory studies, in which researchers were mainly interested in finding differences in psychological functioning without any clear expectation, to detailed hypothesis tests of theories of cross-cultural differences. This book takes stock of the large number of empirical studies conducted over the last decades to evaluate the current state of the field. Specialists from various domains provide an overview of their area, linking it to the fundamental questions of cross-cultural psychology such as how individuals and their cultures are linked, how the link evolves during development, and what the methodological challenges of the field are. This book will appeal to academic researchers and post-graduates interested in cross-cultural research.
Mobility is integral to mankind, but current cognitive research on migrants is almost nonexistent. Most of the existing knowledge on human cognition is based on data collected from (and by) the wealthiest and least mobile citizens of the world. In turn, most of the migration literature relies on superficial, and at times erroneous, assumptions regarding the cognitive processes underlying migratory phenomenon. However, research conducted to date in reveals striking convergences between core issues relevant to scholars in cognitive science on the one hand, and in migration studies on the other. This current lack on cross‐disciplinary dialog has no scientific grounds for two fields, which are inherently interdisciplinary, and yet it has concerning sociopolitical implications. Mapping out a novel research agenda at the crossroads of the cognitive and social sciences, this article stands as an invitation for researchers to engage in further collaborative work involving joint data collections and joint data analyses. This paper argues that researching migrant cognition would give more breadth to cognitive science and more depth to migration studies, which has the potential to better inform the design of public policies. Though the examples of (a) visual perception, (b) future‐oriented cognition, and (c) language acquisition, this article shows that pairing the discoveries of migration scholars and cognitive scientists can move forward our understanding on the human mind, in an ever‐moving world.
This article is categorized under:
• Economics > Individual Decision‐Making
• Psychology > Theory and Methods
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Abstract
Cognition & Migration.
Cultural psychology draws upon major psychological topics, theories, and principles to illustrate the importance of culture in psychological inquiry. It explores how culture broadly connects to psychological processing across diverse cultural communities and settings, highlighting its application to everyday life events and situations, and presenting culture as a complex medium in which individuals acquire skills, values, and abilities. One central theme is the view of culture as a mental and physical construct that individuals live, experience, share, perform, and learn; a second core theme is how culture shapes growth and development. Culture-specific and cross-cultural examples reveal connections between culture and psychological phenomena. The text is multidisciplinary and presents different perspectives on how culture shapes human phenomena. It provides an introduction to this field; covers the history of cultural psychology, cultural evolution, and cultural ecology; explains methods; and examines language and nonverbal communication, and cognition and perception. Topics investigating social behavior include the self, identity, and personality; social relationships, social attitudes, and intergroup contact in a global world; and social influence, aggression, violence, and war. Topics addressing growth and development include human development and its processes, transitions, and rituals across the life span; and socializing agents, socialization practices, and child activities. Additional topics explore emotion and motivation, mental health and psychopathology, and future directions for cultural psychology. Chapters contain teaching and learning tools, including case studies, multidisciplinary contributions, thought-provoking questions, class and experiential activities, a chapter summary, and additional print and media resources.
Causal cognition emerges early in development and confers an important advantage for survival. But does this mean that it is universal in humans? Our cross-disciplinary review suggests a broad evolutionary basis for core components of causal cognition but also underlines the essential role of culturally transmitted content as being uniquely human. The multiple ways in which both content and the key mechanisms of cultural transmission generate cultural diversity suggest that causal cognition in humans is not only colored by their specific cultural background but also shaped more fundamentally by the very fact that humans are a cultural species.
Critics have long complained that naïve realism cannot adequately account for perceptual illusion. This complaint has a tendency to ally itself with the aspersion that naïve realism is hopelessly out of touch with vision science. Here I offer a partial reply to both complaint and aspersion. I do so by showing how careful reflection on a simple, empirically grounded model of illusion reveals heterodox ways of thinking about familiar illusions which are quite congenial to the naïve realist.
Childhood cataract is an avoidable cause of visual disability worldwide and is a priority for VISION 2020: The Right to Sight. There is a paucity of information about the burden of cataract in children and the aim of this review is to assess the global prevalence of childhood cataract. The methodology for the review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. We performed a literature search for studies reporting estimates of prevalence or incidence of cataract among children (aged<18 years) at any global location using the Cochrane Library, Medline and Embase up to January 2015. No restrictions were imposed based on language or year of publication. Study quality was assessed using a critical appraisal tool designed for systematic reviews of prevalence. Twenty prevalence and four incidence studies of childhood cataract from five different geographical regions were included. The overall prevalence of childhood cataract and congenital cataract was in the range from 0.32 to 22.9/10000 children (median=1.03) and 0.63 to 9.74/10000 (median=1.71), respectively. The incidence ranged from 1.8 to 3.6/10000 per year. The prevalence of childhood cataract in low-income economies was found to be 0.42 to 2.05 compared with 0.63 to 13.6/10000 in high-income economies. There was no difference in the prevalence based on laterality or gender. This review highlights substantial gaps in the epidemiological knowledge of childhood cataract worldwide, particularly from low and lower middle-income economies. More studies are needed using standard definitions and case ascertainment methods with large enough sample sizes.
Understanding vision, whether from a neurobiological, psychological or philosophical perspective, represents a daunting challenge that has been pursued for millennia. During at least the last few centuries, natural philosophers, and more recently vision scientists, have recognized that a fundamental problem in biological vision is that the physical sources underlying sensory stimuli are unknowable in any direct sense. In vision, because physical qualities are conflated when the 3-D world is projected onto the 2-D image plane of the retina, the provenance of light reaching the eye at any moment is inevitably uncertain. This quandary is referred to as the inverse optics problem. The relationship of the real world and the information conveyed to the brain by light present a profound problem. Successful behavior in a complex and potentially hostile environment clearly depends on responding appropriately to the sources of visual stimuli rather than to the physical characteristics of the stimuli as such. If the retinal images generated by light cannot specify the underlying reality an observer must deal with, how then does the visual system produce behavior that is generally successful? Perceiving Geometry considers the evidence that, with respect to the perception of geometry, the human visual system solves this problem by incorporating past human experience of what retinal images have typically corresponded to in the real world. This empirical strategy, which is documented by extensive analyses of scene geometry, explains many otherwise puzzling aspects of what we see (i.e., the so-called "geometrical illusions"), providing the best indication to date as to how perceptions of the geometrical aspects of the world are actually generated by the brain. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Perhaps no field of psychology is more strongly motivated and better equipped than evolutionary psychology to respond to the recent call for psychologists to expand their empirical base beyond WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) samples. Evolutionary psychologists have historically focused their efforts on identifying species-specific psychological traits, for which evidence often hinged on the extent to which traits were generalizable across human groups. Now, a new generation of researchers is embracing cultural and environmental variation to test evolutionary hypotheses. Here we discuss how comparative research with diverse societies, while challenging, can help inform the complex nature of our species' psychology and in doing so, we outline best theoretical and methodological practices as well as common pitfalls in cross-cultural investigations. We end with a recommendation for the use of publicly available databases for cataloging psychological variation across the world's many diverse populations. Because of rapid culture change and globalization, it is more important now than ever to document what we know about the world's cultures in ways that can be used by future researchers.
In the Müller-Lyer illusion, human subjects usually see a line with two inducers at its ends facing outwards as longer than an identical line with inducers at its ends facing inwards. We investigate the tendency for fish to perceive, in suitable conditions, line length according to the Müller-Lyer illusion. Redtail splitfins (Xenotoca eiseni, family Goodeidae) were trained to discriminate between two lines of different length. After reaching the learning criterion, the fish performed test trials, in which they faced two lines (black or red) of identical length, differing only in the context in terms of arrangement of the inducers, which were positioned at the ends of the line, either inward, outward, or perpendicular. Fish chose the stimulus that appear to humans as either longer or shorter, in accordance with the prediction of the Müller-Lyer illusion, consistently with the condition of the training. These results show that redtail splitfins tend to be subject to this particular illusion. The results of the study are discussed with reference to similar studies concerning the same illusion as recently observed in fish. Contrasting results are presented. The significance of the results in light of their possible evolutionary implications is also discussed.
This book is about how we see and how we visualize. But it is equally about how we are easily misled by our everyday experiences of these faculties. Galileo is said to have proclaimed (Galilei, 1610/1983; quoted in Slezak, submitted), "dots if men had been born blind, philosophy would be more perfect, because it would lack many false assumptions that have been taken from the sense of sight." Many deep puzzles arise when we try to understand the nature of visual perception, visual imagery or visual thinking. As we try to formulate scientific questions about these human capacities we immediately find ourselves being entranced by the view from within. This view, which the linguist Kenneth Pike (Pike, 1967) has referred to as the emic perspective (as opposed to the external or etic perspective), is both essential and perilous. As scientists we cannot ignore the contents of our conscious experience because this is one of the principle ways of knowing what we see and what our thoughts are about. On the other hand, the contents of our conscious experience are also insidious because they lead us to believe that we can see directly into our own minds and observe the causes of our cognitive processes. Such traps are nothing new; psychology is used to being torn by the duality of mental life --- its subjective and its objective (causal) side. Since people first began to think about the nature of mental states, such as thinking, seeing and imagining, they have had to contend with the fact that knowing how these achievements appear to us on the inside often does us little good, and indeed often leads us in entirely the wrong direction, when we seek a scientific explanation. Of course we have the option of putting aside the quest for a scientific explanation and set our goal towards finding a satisfying description in terms that are consonant with how seeing and imagining appear to us. This might be called a phenomenological approach to understanding the workings of the mind or the everyday folk understanding of vision. There is nothing wrong with such a pursuit. Much popular psychology revels in it, as do a number of different schools of philosophical inquiry (e.g., ordinary language philosophy, phenomenological philosophy). Yet in the long term few of us would be satisfied with an analysis or a natural history of phenomenological regularities. One reason is that characterizing the systematic properties of how things seem to us does not allow us to connect with the natural sciences, to approach the goal of unifying psychology with biology, chemistry and physics. It does not help us to answer the how and why questions; How does vision work? Or, Why do things look the way they do? Or, What happens when we think visually? The problem with trying to understand vision and visual imagery is that on the one hand these phenomena are intimately familiar to us from the inside so it is difficult to objectify them, even though the processes involved are also too fast and too ephemeral to be observed introspectively. On the other hand, what we do observe is misleading because it is always the world as it appears to us that we see, not the real work that is being done by the mind in going from the proximal stimuli, generally optical patterns on the retina, to the familiar experience of seeing (or imagining) the world. The question, How do we see appears very nearly nonsensical: Why, we see by just looking, and the reason that things look as they do to us is that this is the way that they actually are. It is only by objectifying the phenomena, by "making them strange" that we can turn the question into puzzle that can be studied scientifically. One good way to turn the mysteries of vision and imagery into a puzzle is to ask what it would take for a computer to see or imagine. But this is not the only way and indeed this way is often itself laden with our preconceptions, as I will try to show throughout this book. The title of this book is meant to be ambiguous. It means both that seeing and visualizing are different from thinking (and from each other), and that our intuitive views about seeing and visualizing rest largely on a grand illusion. The message of this book is that seeing is different from thinking and to see is not, as it often seems to us, to create an inner replica of the world we are observing or thinking about or visualizing. But this is a long and not always an intuitively compelling story. In fact, its counterintuitive nature is one reason it may be worth telling. When things seem clearly a certain way it is often because we are subject to a general shared illusion. To stand outside this illusion requires a certain act of will and an open-minded and determined look at the evidence. Few people are equipped to do this, and I am not deluded enough to believe that I am the only one who can. But some things about vision and mental imagery are by now clear enough that only deeply ingrained prejudices keep them from being the received view. It is these facts, which seem to me (if not to others) to be totally persuasive, that I concern myself with in this book. If any of the claims appear radical it is not because they represent a leap into the dark caverns of speculative idealism, but only that some ways of looking at the world are just too comfortable and too hard to dismiss. Consequently what might be a straightforward story about how we see, becomes a long journey into the data and theory developed over the past 30 years, as well into the conceptual issues that surround them.
