The effect of object familiarity on the perception of motion.

Martín, Aurelio; Chambeaud, Javier G.; Barraza, J.

doi:10.1037/xhp0000027

Cited by 15 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 18 publications

(36 reference statements)

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“…Scene knowledge affects perception of edge orientations (Neri, 2014). Knowledge of the real-world size of, e.g., a basketball affects apparent speed of motion (by altering perception of distance) (Martín et al, 2015). Knowledge of usual object colors shades our color perception (Hansen et al, 2006; Olkkonen et al, 2008; Witzel et al, 2011; Kimura et al, 2013; Witzel, 2016) and influences the vividness of color afterimages (Lupyan, 2015b).…”

Section: The “Wow” Factor: When Can We Really See Our Knowledge Impacmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing What You See by Changing What You Know: The Role of Attention

Lupyan

2017

Front. Psychol.

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Attending is a cognitive process that incorporates a person’s knowledge, goals, and expectations. What we perceive when we attend to one thing is different from what we perceive when we attend to something else. Yet, it is often argued that attentional effects do not count as evidence that perception is influenced by cognition. I investigate two arguments often given to justify excluding attention. The first is arguing that attention is a post-perceptual process reflecting selection between fully constructed perceptual representations. The second is arguing that attention as a pre-perceptual process that simply changes the input to encapsulated perceptual systems. Both of these arguments are highly problematic. Although some attentional effects can indeed be construed as post-perceptual, others operate by changing perceptual content across the entire visual hierarchy. Although there is a natural analogy between spatial attention and a change of input, the analogy falls apart when we consider other forms of attention. After dispelling these arguments, I make a case for thinking of attention not as a confound, but as one of the mechanisms by which cognitive states affect perception by going through cases in which the same or similar visual inputs are perceived differently depending on the observer’s cognitive state, and instances where cuing an observer using language affects what one sees. Lastly, I provide two compelling counter-examples to the critique that although cognitive influences on perception can be demonstrated in the laboratory, it is impossible to really experience them for oneself in a phenomenologically compelling way. Taken together, the current evidence strongly supports the thesis that what we know routinely influences what we see, that the same sensory input can be perceived differently depending on the current cognitive state of the viewer, and that phenomenologically salient demonstrations are possible if certain conditions are met.

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Section: The “Wow” Factor: When Can We Really See Our Knowledge Impacmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing What You See by Changing What You Know: The Role of Attention

Lupyan

2017

Front. Psychol.

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“…In many of the previously mentioned studies (Hansen et al, 2006; Olkkonen et al, 2008; Witzel et al, 2011; Kimura et al, 2013; Neri, 2014; Martín et al, 2015; Witzel, 2016) purely attentional or post-perceptual processes (Lupyan and Ward, 2013) may have caused the observed effects. For instance, it could be argued that scene knowledge primarily affects orientation judgments, rather than that it causes perceptual distortions.…”

Section: Believing Is Seeingmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…If cp is interpreted in the broad sense, many studies have provided fairly strong evidence of cp. For example, scene knowledge affects perception of edge orientations (Neri, 2014), knowledge of the real-world size of, e.g., a basketball affects apparent speed of motion (by altering perception of distance) (Andrés et al, 2015), knowledge of usual object colors shades our color perception (Hansen et al, 2006; Olkkonen et al, 2008; Witzel et al, 2011; Kimura et al, 2013) and influences the intensity of color afterimages (Lupyan, 2015a,b), and hearing the right word can make something visible that is otherwise invisible (Lupyan and Ward, 2013). …”

Section: Believing Is Seeingmentioning

confidence: 99%

No Evidence of Narrowly Defined Cognitive Penetrability in Unambiguous Vision

2017

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The classical notion of cognitive impenetrability suggests that perceptual processing is an automatic modular system and not under conscious control. Near consensus is now emerging that this classical notion is untenable. However, as recently pointed out by Firestone and Scholl, this consensus is built on quicksand. In most studies claiming perception is cognitively penetrable, it remains unclear which actual process has been affected (perception, memory, imagery, input selection or judgment). In fact, the only available “proofs” for cognitive penetrability are proxies for perception, such as behavioral responses and neural correlates. We suggest that one can interpret cognitive penetrability in two different ways, a broad sense and a narrow sense. In the broad sense, attention and memory are not considered as “just” pre- and post-perceptual systems but as part of the mechanisms by which top-down processes influence the actual percept. Although many studies have proven top-down influences in this broader sense, it is still debatable whether cognitive penetrability remains tenable in a narrow sense. The narrow sense states that cognitive penetrability only occurs when top-down factors are flexible and cause a clear illusion from a first person perspective. So far, there is no strong evidence from a first person perspective that visual illusions can indeed be driven by high-level flexible factors. One cannot be cognitively trained to see and unsee visual illusions. We argue that this lack of convincing proof for cognitive penetrability in the narrow sense can be explained by the fact that most research focuses on foveal vision only. This type of perception may be too unambiguous for transient high-level factors to control perception. Therefore, illusions in more ambiguous perception, such as peripheral vision, can offer a unique insight into the matter. They produce a clear subjective percept based on unclear, degraded visual input: the optimal basis to study narrowly defined cognitive penetrability.

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“…The reason knowing the size of a basketball affects perceived speed (Martín et al, 2015) is that speed perception requires computing distance and knowing the size helps in computing the distance. The point that cognitive effects ought to affect perception insofar as they are able to inform perceptual computations is often missed, as when some proponents of cognitive penetrability seem to suggest that , e.g., knowing that light is both a particle and a wave ought to affect how we see light or that knowing that the earth goes around ought to affect how we see a sunset (Churchland, 1979(Churchland, , 1988; see e.g., Stokes, 2013 for discussion).…”

Section: What Kinds Of Knowledge Should and Should Not Affect Perceptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(5) Knowledge of the real-world size of e.g., a basketball affects apparent speed of motion (by altering perception of distance) (Martín, Chambeaud, & Barraza, 2015). This shows that our perception of speed is influenced by our knowledge of size, rendering moot the idea that our perception of speed simply reflects an objective velocity.…”

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confidence: 99%

How reliable is perception?

Lupyan¹

2017

Preprint

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People believe that perception is reliable and that what they perceive reflects objective reality. On this view, we perceive a red circle because there is something out there that is a red circle. It is also commonly believed that perceptual reliability is threatened if what we see is allowed to be influenced by what we know or expect. I argue that although human perception is often (but not always) highly consistent and stable, it is difficult to evaluate its reliability because when it comes to perception, it is unclear how one could establish a fact of the matter. An alternative to thinking of perception as being in the business of truth, is thinking of it as being in the business of transducing sensory energy into a form useful for guiding adaptive behavior. On this position, perception ought to be (and, as I argue, is) richly influenced by some types of knowledge insofar as this knowledge can aid in the construction of useful representations from sensory input.

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The effect of object familiarity on the perception of motion.

Cited by 15 publications

References 18 publications

Changing What You See by Changing What You Know: The Role of Attention

Changing What You See by Changing What You Know: The Role of Attention

No Evidence of Narrowly Defined Cognitive Penetrability in Unambiguous Vision

How reliable is perception?

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