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Cognitive Penetration and Memory Colour Effects

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Abstract

Cognition can influence action. Your belief that it is raining outside, for example, may cause you to reach for the umbrella. Perception can also influence cognition. Seeing that no raindrops are falling, for example, may cause you to think that you don’t need to reach for an umbrella. The question that has fascinated philosophers and cognitive scientists for the past few decades, however, is whether cognition can influence perception. Can, for example, your desire for a rainy day cause you to see, hear, or feel raindrops when you walk outside? More generally, can our cognitive states (such as beliefs, desires or intentions) influence the way we see the external world? In this paper, I discuss three experiments on memory colour effects. In these experiments, subjects systematically made different colour matches or adjustments for object-patches representing objects that have prototypical colours and neutral object-patches. I argue that these differences are not merely differences in judgments but are best explained in terms of phenomenology. However, I show that these differences in phenomenology can be explained without reference to cognitive states such as colour concepts or beliefs.

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Adopted from Wired.com http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/

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Adopted by the NYT http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/28/science/white-or-blue-dress.html

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Notes

  1. Henceforth, I will use the terms ‘cognition’ and ‘perception’ with this understanding in mind unless indicated otherwise and the terms ‘experience’ or ‘colour experience’ to refer to the phenomenal character or content of colour experience.

  2. The term “memory colour” refers to the association between an object and its typical or prototypical colour, e.g., apples are red while bananas are yellow. I discuss this phenomenon in depth in Sect. 3.

  3. Nelder (1986), a statistician, worried about reproducibility in statistical studies and warned of a growing literature which placed great emphasis on the notion of significant difference (i.e., the notion that a result has significance if it is very unlikely to have occurred given the null hypothesis) in the reporting of a single experiment. This, he thought, could lead to an absence of checking the results, which can have detrimental consequences for scientific progress if the results of this original experiment would not have been reported if the effects were not presented as significant. Although this is clearly a serious issue, worthy of much consideration, in the philosophy of science, it falls outside the scope of the present paper. Of course, it may seem that by reporting the results of these experiments because they have been widely reported in philosophical literature, I am participating in the sort of reproducibility Nelder has in mind. However, my argument does not rely on the correctness of the results of the studies I am discussing. I am simply using these studies to show that even if their results are correct, we can still resist the claim that colour concepts or beliefs influence colour perception. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this worry.

  4. Macpherson (2012) argues that this study presents a counterexample to the claim that colour experience is not penetrated by cognitive states such as colour concepts or beliefs.

  5. The experiment also included a third successive trial: subjects were given a 10-min break after the second trial and were asked to make matched from memory. The description provided here ignores this portion of the experiment since the results of this trial are not pertinent to the discussion.

  6. Zeimbekis (2013) attributes the anchoring bias to Tversky and Kahneman (1974) and notes that the adjustments made are often insufficient, so the fact that estimates are anchored in the value constitutes a source of bias in judgment.

  7. On this view, perceptual systems execute “unconscious inferences” from sensory stimuli to hypotheses about the environment was initially proposed by von Helmholtz (1866) and is now known as constructivism (see Gregory 1970, 2009; Mamassian et al. 2002; Rescorla 2013).

  8. For example, Ling and Hurlbert (2008) use the term “colour memory” even though they are discussing memory colour.

  9. There is, nevertheless, some evidence that memory colour influences colour memory, e.g., when the colours of colour-prototypical objects is memorized it tends to shift towards the object’s memory colour (Van Gulick and Tarr 2010).

  10. The “contemporary theory of perception” they are referring to is constructivism (see Gregory 1970, 2009; Mamassian et al. 2002; Rescorla 2013).

  11. Here Hansen and colleagues use the term “diagnostic” colour, but the term “prototypical” is more accurate (see footnotes 12 and 15).

  12. Nor do they result from eye movement. Prinzmetal (1990) found that subjects were significantly more likely to judge the target (a letter in a word) as more similar to the colour of other letters within the unit (the word) than the colours of letters outside that unit.

  13. Studies show that although simultaneous colour constancy is limited and variable, successive colour constancy is fast and reliable (Foster and Nascimento 1994).

  14. It is also possible that successive colour contrast effects account for these differences in Delk and Fillenbaum’s study. The fact that the scene was lit using a fluorescent light (which has a greenish tint, at least in photographs in the absence of colour correction) may have contributed to the differences in appearance since it may have had a different effect on the coloured light that was used to generate the background than it had on the surface colour of the figure, thereby creating an ambiguity similar to that causing the public controversy over the blue-black dress. I am grateful to Bob Kentridge for suggesting this possibility.

  15. I thank an anonymous reviewer for making this suggestion.

  16. Colour prototypicality describes how well an object resembles the prototype of a particular category while colour diagnosticity describes the degree to which a color is associated with or characteristic of a particular object.

  17. I purposely avoided using the phrase “objects that are characteristically red” here because it suggests that it is colour diagnosticity (i.e., the degree to which a colour is associated with or characteristic of a particular object) that is responsible for object recognition. However, studies show that colour prototypicality (i.e., how well an object resembles the prototype of a particular category) and not colour diagnosticity is what improves object recognition (see Tanaka and Pressnell 1999; Wurm et al. 1993).

  18. The retinal image is inherently ambiguous because a single pattern of retinal stimulation can be caused by a variety of different stimulus configurations.

  19. Attention, which reflects current motivational relevance, and expectation, which reflects prior information about the probabilistic nature of our environment, play a similar role as they provide contextual probabilities that are used for the disambiguation the retinal image (for a review see Summerfield and Egner 2009).

  20. I am following Burge (2010) here in distinguishing between the perceiver and her perceptual system.

  21. This is indeed a common view among vision scientists who tend to adopt a constructionist approach to vision. In 1997, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (B series) devoted an entire issue to the issue of knowledge-based vision (Volume 352, Issue 1358). Contributed authors included Barlow (1997), Gregory (1997) and Milner (1997).

  22. In his paper “The facts of perception”, Helmholtz explains that these “inferences are unconscious insofar as their major premise is not necessarily expressed in the form of a proposition; it is formed from a series of experiences whose individual members have entered consciousness only in the form of sense impressions which have long since disappeared from memory. Some fresh sense impression forms the minor premise, to which the rule impressed upon us by previous observations is applied.”

  23. For an application of Bayesian modeling to colour constancy see Brainard and Freeman (1997) and Brainard (2009).

  24. I am indebted to three anonymous reviewers for invaluable comments. I also am grateful to the audiences of the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology Conference, the Virginia Philosophical Association Conference, and the Minds Online Conference for providing comments on earlier versions of this paper. Many thanks to Bence Nanay and his group at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp, Bob Kentridge, Brit Brogaard, Fiona Macpherson, and Susanna Siegel for invaluable comments on many of the issues discussed in this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The University of Akron/Wayne College, 290 E. Buchtel Avenue, Akron, OH, 44325-1903, USA

    Dimitria Electra Gatzia

  2. Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Dimitria Electra Gatzia

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Gatzia, D.E. Cognitive Penetration and Memory Colour Effects. Erkenn 84, 121–143 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9951-x

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