Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at (...) work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flowed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states. (shrink)

According to the two visual systems model, the visual processing of objects divides into semantic and pragmatic processing. We provide various criteria for this distinction. Further, we argue that both the semantic and pragmatic processing of visual information about objects should be divided into low-level processing and high-level processing. Finally, we re-evaluate the contribution of the human parietal lobe to the concious visual perception of spatial relations among objects.

The sensorimotor account of vision proposed by O'Regan & Noë (O&N) challenges the classical view of visual cognition as a process of mentally representing the world. Many infant cognition researchers would probably disagree. I describe the surprising ability of young infants to represent and reason about the physical world, and ask how this capacity can be explained in non-representational terms. As a first step toward answering this question, I suggest that recent models of embodied cognition may (...) help illustrate a way of escaping the representational trap. (shrink)

Case studies of diverse scientific fields show how scientists use a range of resources to generate new interpretative models and to establish their plausibility as explanations of a domain. They accomplish this by manipulating imagistic representations in particular ways. I show that scientists in different domains use the same basic transformations. Common features of these transformations indicate that general cognitive strategies of interpretation, simplification, elaboration, and argumentation are at work. Social and historical studies of science emphasize the diversity of local (...) contexts of practice. However, the existence of common strategies shows that this diversity masks an important repertoire of cognitive strategies. Scientists use this repertoire to adapt their representations to meet the cognitive demands of different contexts of practice. This paper considers the implications of this finding for the notion of scientists as cognitive agents in distributed knowledge-producing systems. (shrink)

The Necker cube and the productive class of related stimuli involving multiple depth interpretations driven by corner-like line junctions are often taken to be ambiguous. This idea is normally taken to be as little in need of defense as the claim that the Necker cube gives rise to multiple distinct percepts. In the philosophy of language, it is taken to be a substantive question whether a stimulus that affords multiple interpretations is a case of ambiguity. If we take into account (...) what have been identified as hallmark features of ambiguity and look at the empirical record, it appears that the Necker cube and related stimuli are not ambiguous. I argue that this raises problems for extant models of multistable perception in cognitive neuroscience insofar as they are purported to apply to these stimuli. Helpfully, similar considerations also yield reasons to suggest that the relevant models are well motivated for other instances of multistable perception. However, a different breed of model seems to be required for the Necker cube and related stimuli. I end with a sketch how one may go about designing such a model relying on oscillatory patters in neural firing. I suggest that distinctions normally confined to the philosophy of language are important for the study of perception, a perspective with a growing number of adherents. (shrink)

Most contemporary approaches to meaning presume the limitation of semiotics (Didi-Huberman, Gumbrecht, Belting). The question of what kind of “semiotics” is required has not been asked. However, without some general science of meaning it is impossible to reform theory without committing past errors or ignoring progress. In the interest of reconnecting contemporary interests in “presence” to long-evolving needs, I review the ossification and decline of one theory of semiotics that serves as the tacit model rejected today. I return to problems (...) of the nature of the sign – whether it is “digital” or “analog” and conceived as “communication” or merely “meaning.” I then reconstitute a workable visual cognitive semiotics based on phenomenological premises. (shrink)

Ways of Seeing is a unique collaboration between an eminent philosopher and a world famous neuroscientist. It focuses on one of the most basic human functions - vision. What does it mean to 'see'. It brings together electrophysiological studies, neuropsychology, psychophysics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. The first truly interdisciplinary book devoted to the topic of vision, it will make a valuable contribution to the field of cognitive science.

The verification of a sentence against a visual display in experimental conditions reveals a procedure that is driven solely by the properties of the linguistic input and not by the properties of the context (the set-up of the visual display) or extra-linguistic cognition (operations executed to obtain the truth value). This procedure, according to the Interface Transparency Thesis (ITT) (Lidz et al. in Nat Lang Semant 19(3):227–256, 2011), represents the meaning of an expression at the interface with (...) the ‘conceptual-intentional’ system (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995). My experiments provide support for the ITT by replicating in Polish and in Bulgarian the findings of Lidz et al. (Nat Lang Semant 19(3):227–256, 2011) for the English quantifier most. We also obtain new evidence that participants are prompted to switch between verification procedures by a change in the linguistic input (a different superlative quantifier entailed by most), but not by a change in the visual input. Thus, the motivation for the subconscious switch in procedures is not to maximize efficiency. Participants use the procedure associated with each quantifier, and in effect, the same display is verified differently depending on which information the visual system is instructed to use by the semantic representation of the sentence. (shrink)

Complex problem solving is often an integration of perceptual processing and deliberate planning. But what balances these two processes, and how do novices differ from experts? We investigate the interplay between these two in the game of SET. This article investigates how people combine bottom-up visual processes and top-down planning to succeed in this game. Using combinatorial and mixed-effect regression analysis of eye-movement protocols and a cognitive model of a human player, we show that SET players deploy both bottom-up (...) and top-down processes in parallel to accomplish the same task. The combination of competition and cooperation of both types of processes is a major factor of success in the game. Finally, we explore strategies players use during the game. Our findings suggest that within-trial strategy shifts can occur without the need of explicit meta-cognitive control, but rather implicitly as a result of evolving memory activations. (shrink)

We present a general cognitive architecture that tightly integrates symbolic, spatial, and visual representations. A key means to achieving this integration is allowing cognition to move freely between these modes, using mental imagery. The specific components and their integration are motivated by results from psychology, as well as the need for developing a functional and efficient implementation. We discuss functional benefits that result from the combination of multiple content-based representations and the specialized processing units associated with them. Instantiating (...) this theory, we then discuss the architectural components and processes, and illustrate the resulting functional advantages in two spatially and visually rich domains. The theory is then compared to other prominent approaches in the area. (shrink)

This study introduces visual cognition into Lithium-ion battery capacity estimation. The proposed method consists of four steps. First, the acquired charging current or discharge voltage data in each cycle are arranged to form a two-dimensional image. Second, the generated image is decomposed into multiple spatial-frequency channels with a set of orientation subbands by using non-subsampled contourlet transform. NSCT imitates the multichannel characteristic of the human visual system that provides multiresolution, localization, directionality, and shift invariance. Third, several time-domain (...) indicators of the NSCT coefficients are extracted to form an initial high-dimensional feature vector. Similarly, inspired by the HVS manifold sensing characteristic, the Laplacian eigenmap manifold learning method, which is considered to reveal the evolutionary law of battery performance degradation within a low-dimensional intrinsic manifold, is used to further obtain a low-dimensional feature vector. Finally, battery capacity degradation is estimated using the geodesic distance on the manifold between the initial and the most recent features. Verification experiments were conducted using data obtained under different operating and aging conditions. Results suggest that the proposed visual cognition approach provides a highly accurate means of estimating battery capacity and thus offers a promising method derived from the emerging field of cognitive computing. (shrink)

Norman presents intriguing arguments in support of a mapping between ecological and constructivist visual cognition, on the one hand, onto the dorsal ventral dual route processing hypothesis, on the other hand. Unfortunately, his account is incompatible with developmental data on the functional emergence of the dorsal and ventral routes. We argue that it is essential for theories of adult visual cognition to take constraints from development seriously.

Human vision raises a number of puzzles. Among them are the puzzles of visual experience: how to provide a scientific understanding of the phenomenal character of the visual experiences of the shapes, textures, colors, orientations and motion of perceived objects? How can a purely subjective visual experience be the basis of so much objective knowledge of the world? Visually guided actions raise a different puzzle: how can actions directed towards a target be so accurate in the absence (...) of the agent’s awareness of many of the target’s visual attributes? Ways of Seeing has three related goals, the first of which is to make the case for a broadly representational approach to the above set of puzzles. The second goal of WoS is to argue that the version of the ‘two-visual systems’ model of human vision best supported by the current empirical evidence has the resources to solve the puzzle of visually guided actions, which has been at the center of much recent work in the cognitive neuroscience of vision and action. The third goal of WoS is to draw attention to some of the tensions between acceptance of the two-visual systems model of human vision and some influential views about the nature and function of the content of visual experience espoused by philosophers in response to the puzzles raised by visual experience. (shrink)

The volumes are self contained and can be used individually in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses ranging from introductory psychology, linguistics, ...

Indian culture relies greatly on visual expression, and this book uses both classical Indian and contemporary Western philosophies and current studies on cognitive sciences, and applies them to contextualize Tantric visual culture. It utilizes the contemporary theories of metaphor and cognitive blend, the theory of metonymy, and a holographic theory of epistemology with a focus on concept formation and its application to the study of myths and images. It applies the classical aesthetic theory of rasa to unravel the (...) meaning of opaque images. This philosophical and cognitive analysis allows materials from Indian culture to be understood in a new light, while engaging contemporary theories of cognitive science and semantics. (shrink)

Although the study of visual perception has made more progress in the past 40 years than any other area of cognitive science, there remain major disagreements as to how closely vision is tied to general cognition. This paper sets out some of the arguments for both sides and defends the position that an important part of visual perception, which may be called early vision or just vision, is prohibited from accessing relevant expectations, knowledge and utilities - in (...) other words it is cognitively impenetrable. That part of vision is complex and articulated and provides a representation of the 3-D surfaces of objects sufficient to serve as an index into memory, with somewhat different outputs being made available to other systems such as those dealing with motor control. The paper also addresses certain conceptual and methodological issues, including the use of signal detection theory and event-related potentials to assess cognitive penetration of vision. A distinction is made among several stages in visual processing. These include, in addition to the inflexible early-vision stage, a pre-perceptual attention allocation stage and a post-perceptual evaluation, memory-accessing, and inference stage which provide several different highly constrained ways in which cognition can affect the outcome of visual perception. The paper discusses arguments that have been presented in both computer vision and psychology showing that vision is "intelligent" and involves elements of problem solving". It is suggested that these cases do not show cognitive penetration, but rather they show that certain natural constraints on interpretation, concerned primarily with optical and geometrical properties of the world, have been compiled into the visual system. The paper also examines a number of examples where instructions and "hints" are alleged to affect. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the visual aspect of metaphors, offering a new theory of metaphor that characterizes its syntactic structure, material composition and visuality as its essence. It will accordingly present the metaphorical creating or transfiguring, as well as conceiving or understanding, of one thing as a different one, as a visual ability. It is a predication by means of producing non-conventional compositions – i.e., by compositional, or even aesthetic, means. This definition is aimed to apply to the various (...) kinds of metaphors: conceptual, linguistic, visual, and material. It will thus challenge the definition of metaphor as a conceptual or linguistic phenomenon in nature that is based on its semantic mechanism, broad concepts, and cognitive value. Those definitions have been prevalent since the second half of 20th century, under the influence of the philosophy of language, and later of cognitive studies. (shrink)

Seeing happens effortlessly and yet is endlessly complex. Among the most fascinating aspects of visual perception is its stability and constancy. As we shift our gaze or move about the world, the light projected onto the retinas is constantly changing. Yet the surrounding objects appear stable in their properties. Psychologists have long been interested in the constancies. They have asked questions such as: How good is constancy? Is constancy a fact about how things look, or is it a product (...) of our beliefs and judgments about how things look? How can the contents of visual experience be studied experimentally? Philosophers have long been interested in characterizing visual experience and have become widely interested in the constancies more recently. As psychologists and philosophers have interacted, new questions have arisen: If experience is not as of retinal stimulation (proximal mode), but does not always exhibit constancy (or at least not in all respects), how shall we describe this intermediate state? Also, should we regard any departure from constancy as a failure of the visual system, or might it be a reasonable or adaptive response? In what circumstances is seeing highly conditioned by cognitive factors such as background assumptions, and in what circumstances not? Our volume focuses on size constancy and color constancy. It considers methodologies for studying conscious visual perception, efforts to describe visual experience in relation to constancy, what it means that constancy is not always perfect, and the conceptual resources needed for explaining visual experience. (shrink)

In this paper art history and visual studies, the disciplines that study visual culture, are presented as a field whose conjectural paradigm can be used to understand the epistemic problems associated with abduction. In order to do so, significant statements, concepts and arguments from the work of several specialists in this field have been highlighted. Their analysis shows the fruitfulness and potential for understanding the study of visual culture as a field that is interwoven with the assumptions (...) of abductive cognition. (shrink)

This paper discusses a counterexample to the thesis that visual experience is cognitively impenetrable. My central claim is that sometimes visual experience is influenced by the perceiver’s beliefs, rendering her experience’s representational content indeterminate. After discussing other examples of cognitive penetrability, I focus on a certain kind of visual experience— that is, an experience that occurs under radically nonstandard conditions—and show that it may have indeterminate content, particularly with respect to low-level properties such as colors and shapes. (...) I then explain how this indeterminacy depends on the perceiver’s beliefs or thoughts. Finally, I attempt to generalize the case and show how other sorts of visual experiences can also be penetrated by beliefs and, hence, be indeterminate. (shrink)

Visual Search without Selective Attention calls into question the necessity of a covert selective attention mechanism by implementing a formal model that includes basic visual mechanisms, saccades, and simple task strategies. Across three search tasks, the model accounts for response times as well as the proportion of errors observed in human participants, including effects of item crowding in the visual stimulus.

Visual analytics is a new interdisciplinary field of study that calls for a more structured scientific approach to understanding the effects of interaction with complex graphical displays on human cognitive processes. Its primary goal is to support the design and evaluation of graphical information systems that better support cognitive processes in areas as diverse as scientific research and emergency management. The methodologies that make up this new field are as yet ill defined. This paper proposes a pathway for development (...) of visual analytics as a translational cognitive science that bridges fundamental research in human/computer cognitive systems and design and evaluation of information systems in situ. Achieving this goal will require the development of enhanced field methods for conceptual decomposition of human/computer cognitive systems that maps onto laboratory studies, and improved methods for conducting laboratory investigations that might better map onto real-world cognitive processes in technology-rich environments. (shrink)

How can we investigate the foundations of consciousness? In addressing this question, we will focus on the two main strategies that authors have adopted so far. On the one hand, there is research aimed at characterizing a specific content, which should account for conscious states. We may call this the content approach. On the other hand, one finds the processing approach, which proposes to look for a particular way of processing to account for consciousness.. Our aim, in this paper, is (...) to develop arguments for the latter approach. We focus on a criticism of Jesse Prinz’s AIR theory of consciousness. We have chosen Prinz’s theory because it incorporates features of both the content and processing approaches, and discussing it will therefore allow us to compare the advantages and downsides of both. Our argument will focus in particular on the notion of intermediate-level. We will discuss how Prinz characterizes the intermediate-level according to a content approach, and argue that such a characterization is inadequate. Finally, we will argue in favor of processing approach to the problem of consciousness, which also accounts for the massive interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes in the brain. Even though consciousness remains an unsolved riddle, we claim that this is the best path towards a solution. (shrink)

This paper presents a study of the generation, manipulation and use of visual representations in different episodes of scientific discovery. The study identifies a common set of transformations of visual representations underlying the distinctive methods and imagery of different scientific fields. The existence of common features behind the diversity of visual representations suggests a common dynamical structure for visual thinking, showing how visual representations facilitate cognitive processes such as pattern-matching and visual inference through the (...) use of tools, technologies and other cultural resources. This dynamical model suggests a way of theorizing the interaction of cognitive, socio-cultural and technological aspects of science without losing sight of the essential contribution each makes to the processes of discovery. Whereas scientific work is often construed epistemically, as having the aim of improving the fit between theories and phenomena or culturally given notions of what counts as reality, this study shows that scientists use transformations to modify visual representations in ways that achieve other kinds of match: between a representation and the cognitive demands of a task or between an emerging representation and the social need to communicate and negotiate new meanings in a context of culturally embedded conventions. By showing how images connect each of the overlapping contexts of scientific work the proposed model negotiates the sometimes contested boundary between cognitive and social aspects of science. (shrink)

We argue that cognitive functions are not reducible to biological functionality. Since only neural animals can develop complex forms of agency, we assume that genuinely cognitive processes are deeply related with the activity of the nervous system. We first analyze the significance of the appearance of the nervous system in certain multicellular organisms, arguing that it has changed the logic of their biological organization. Then, we focus on the appearance of specifically cognitive capacities within the nervous system. Considering a case (...) of a minimal form of perceptual representation, we analyze the specific functional role of this minimal form of activity in relatively earlier nervous systems, arguing that though this role is only understandable within a biological organization, yet it is not reducible to the underlying biological functionality. Finally, we conclude that the appearance of cognition is in turn linked to the emergence of an autonomous neurodynamic domain and a qualitative change in body complexity. (shrink)

Cognitive impenetrability (CI) of a large part of visual perception is taken for granted by those of us in the field of computational vision who attempt to recover descriptions of space using geometry and statistics as tools. These tools clearly point out, however, that CI cannot extend to the level of structured descriptions of object surfaces, as Pylyshyn suggests. The reason is that visual space – the description of the world inside our heads – is a nonEuclidean curved (...) space. As a consequence, the only alternative for a vision system is to develop several descriptions of space–time; these are representations of reduced intricacy and capture partial aspects of objective reality. As such, they make sense in the context of a class of tasks/actions/plans/purposes, and thus cannot be cognitively impenetrable. (shrink)

Drawn sequences of images, like those in comics and picture stories, are a pervasive and fundamental way that humans have communicated for millennia. Yet, the study of visual narratives has only recently gained traction in Cognitive Science. Here we explore what has held back the study of the cognition of visual narratives, and why researchers should join in scholarship of this ubiquitous aspect of expression.

La conception naïve de l’expérience visuelle dépeint celle-ci comme une relation directe, primitive, entre le sujet voyant et l’objet vu. Elle repose sur une opposition entre la relation visuelle et la représentation mentale de l’objet vu dans l’imagination visuelle ou la vision des images. Le but de cet article est de suggérer que l’opposition naïve entre relation et représentation présente un intérêt philosophique et scientifique parfois sous-estimé. Deux théories philosophiques de la perception sont présentées : le relationnisme reprend l’esprit de (...) la conception naïve en analysant l’expérience visuelle comme une relation non représentationnelle à l’objet vu, alors que l’intentionnalisme rejette la conception naïve comme inadéquate et considère que l’expérience visuelle est représentationnelle de part en part. Après avoir introduit une notion générale de « représentation » acceptable par les deux parties, nous examinons un ensemble de travaux issus des sciences cognitives et susceptibles d’arbitrer le débat entre relationnisme et intentionnalisme. La thèse principale défendue est que le relationnisme est compatible avec les données scientifiques à notre disposition sur les processus cognitifs liés à la vision. Le relationnisme présente également un avantage philosophique puisqu’il permet de comprendre comment les représentations mentales, y compris visuelles, peuvent être fondées sur un rapport cognitif plus direct, c’est-à-dire intrinsèquement relationnel, au monde visible. (shrink)

Research in vision science, developmental psychology, and the foundations of cognitive science has led some theorists to posit referential mechanisms similar to indices. This hypothesis has been framed within a Fodorian conception of the early vision module. The article shows that this conception is mistaken, for it cannot handle the ‘interface problem’—roughly, how indexing mechanisms relate to higher cognition and conceptual thought. As a result, I reject the inaccessibility of early vision to higher cognition and make some constructive (...) remarks on the perception–cognition interface. -/- 1 The Case for Visual Indices 1.1 Preliminary assumptions 1.2 Transcendental arguments 1.3 Evidence from vision science 2 Visual Indices, Object Files, and Fodorian Modularity 3 The Interface Problem 3.1 Top-down attention and modularity 3.2 Selective attention and information 4 Revising the Indexing Hypothesis 4.1 Revising the perception–cognition interface 4.2 Revising the modularity of early vision 5 Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

What influences people’s appreciation of works of art? In this paper, we provide a new cognitive approach to this big question, and the first empirical results in support of it. As a work of art typically does not activate intuitive cognition for functional artefacts, it is represented as an instance of non-verbal symbolic communication. By application of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory of communication, we hypothesize that understanding the artist’s intention plays a crucial role in intuitive art appreciation judgements. (...) About 60 works of fine art, representing a wide range of periods, genres and styles, were selected in the permanent exhibitions at Tate Britain in London, and rated by more than 500 visitors for goodness and understanding of the artist’s intention. Results suggest that works of art whose artist’s intention is easy to understand tend to be preferred over those with more obscure intentions, even when controlling for familiarity effects. (shrink)