Abstract
I argue that perception of absence presents a top-down effect from expectations on perception, but then show that this cognitive effect is atypical and indirect. This calls into question usefulness of some of the existing notions of cognitive penetrability of perception and generates new questions about indirect cognitive influences on perception.
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Notes
In this paper ‘perception of absence’ will refer to perceptual states that carry the information that a certain object (or a group of objects) is missing or absent. ‘Perception of absence’ is also frequently used to refer to perception of shadows, darkness, or holes (see, for example, Sorensen 2008 and Casati & Varzi 1994). Because I take the latter set of cases to constitute a somewhat different phenomenon, I will bracket them in the discussion here.
I will not be assuming that cognitive modules are innate and anatomically localized. Neural localization and nativism were a part of Fodor’s case for modularity. However, they were much less important in his overall case than informational encapsulation, so I will keep a similar focus here.
See Macpherson (2006) for the discussion of attention-based approaches to the perception of ambiguous figures.
Not all mismatches give rise to experiences of absence. Mismatches in the early stages of visual processing aren’t relevant because they don’t relate the right kinds of states (templates and percepts). Object-level mismatches are relevant and raise two questions. First, object-level mismatches may signal unexpected changes in an object. When do they communicate absences of objects? Second, when absence-communicating mismatches give rise to conscious experiences of absence? Here are some tentative answers. Regarding (1), the expectation set will matter, as will the salience of the missing object (more on this in Farennikova 2013). Regarding (2), a Fodorian reply: we don’t know. Consciousness research points to a key role of working memory and (object-based) attention in generating conscious representations. Presumably, these factors also matter for absences. Agostinelli et al. (1986) change blindness study focuses on the detection of deletions of prominent objects in scenes, but the question has received little attention since.
Experiences of disappearances interestingly contrast with search-based experiences of absence. The former seem to be more modular and more obviously perceptual, yet they share in the paradox of absence perception: they manage to express visually that a certain object is no longer present. How do they do that? I hope to address this and related issues in a separate paper on disappearances, and I’d like to thank the anonymous reviewer for raising interesting questions about this phenomenon.
Experiences of absence do not always express failure of prediction. Sometimes we see absences we expect to see. For instance, a jogger can come to expect to see no people on a track at 5 AM. Each morning, her prediction is confirmed. But confirmation shouldn’t be equated with conformity. The streets won’t look empty to the jogger because she wishes for them to be empty. Experiences of expected absences aren’t essentially a product of a confirmation bias.
You could try to get yourself into a position in which the detection process becomes spontaneous. For instance, you could manipulate your perceptual system to get interested in checking whether there is a zebra in your office (perhaps by imagining zebras inside various offices).
This way of carving things in the mind seems to imply that perception of absence is directly penetrated by imagery. The implication does not follow. Recall that in order to show that we have an effect on perception, we appealed to mismatches, which relate two perceptual elements: images and percepts (section 3.1). But now we classify images as cognitive. We can’t have both. If images are both constitutive of experiences of absence and are cognitive, then perception of absence is also cognitive. To classify images as cognitive is thus to give up on the claim that we have an effect on perception – and effectively, to give up on H.
This argument addresses expectation-based facilitation. Plausibly, it also extends to non-predictive facilitative influences. For instance, it’s been shown that positive affect improves performance in various attentional domains (Phelps et al. 2006). By extension, affect-based facilitation will also count as cognitive penetration even though it is not driven by uncertainty in the world.
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Farennikova, A. Perception of Absence and Penetration from Expectation. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 621–640 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0188-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0188-1