Psychophysics

Confidence can dissociate from perceptual accuracy, suggesting distinct computational and neural processes underlie these psychological functions. Recent investigations have therefore sought to experimentally isolate metacognitive processes by creating conditions where perceptual sensitivity is matched but confidence differs (“matched-performance / different-confidence”; MPDC). Despite these endeavors’ success, much remains unknown about MPDC effects and how to best harness them in experimental settings. Here we developed a principled approach to comprehensively characterizing MPDC effects through analyzing metaperceptual (i.e., type 2 psychometric) functions relating objective (...) performance to subjective confidence across widely varying performance levels and experimental manipulations. We found that MPDC effect magnitude depends on stimulus properties, observers’ sensitivity level, and critically on trial type order (blocked or interleaved across stimulus property variations). Our findings provide the first comprehensive exploration of MPDC effects, offer a prescriptive guide to metaperceptual analysis, and suggest optimal experimental paradigms for experimentally isolating metacognition and awareness in future studies. (shrink)

It is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ format. This is seen to explain pre-attentive vision’s characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision amount to? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is adequate: one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures its (...) ability to do the explanatory work which motivates positing pre-attentive visual icons in the first place. With this noted, I introduce the (heretofore unarticulated) notion of an ‘Analog Map’ and argue that it provides a superior characterisation of pre-attentive vision’s iconicity. I then argue that this forces a reassessment of debates which have traditionally presupposed the iconicity of pre-attentive vision, emphasising ramifications for the viability of a format-based perception-thought border. (shrink)

This paper refines a controversial proposal: that core systems belong to a perceptual kind, marked out by the format of its representational outputs. Following Susan Carey, this proposal has been understood in terms of core representations having an iconic format, like certain paradigmatically perceptual outputs. I argue that they don’t, but suggest that the proposal may be better formulated in terms of a broader analogue format type. Formulated in this way, the proposal accommodates the existence of genuine icons in perception, (...) and avoids otherwise troubling objections. (shrink)

Color-motion asynchrony (CMA) refers to an apparent lag of direction of motion when a dynamic stimulus changes both color and direction at the same time. The subjective order of simultaneous events, however, is not only perceptual but also subject to illusions during voluntary actions. Self-initiated actions, for example, seem to precede their sensory outcomes following an adaptation to a delay between the action and the sensory feedback. Here, we demonstrate that the extent of the apparent asynchrony can be substantially reduced (...) when direction change is induced by a voluntary key press following a delay adaptation regime. We also show that the reduced color-motion asynchrony effect size following a motor-sensory recalibration is not a result of a change in the onset of perceived direction change relative to that of the color. This is particularly important as it implies, for the first time in the literature, that voluntary action is not only important in forming action-sensory outcome associations but may also act as a binding factor between the two perceptual features of a sensory event. (shrink)

On a now orthodox view, humans and many other animals are endowed with a “number sense”, or approximate number system (ANS), that represents number. Recently, this orthodox view has been subject to numerous critiques, with critics maintaining either that numerical content is absent altogether, or else that some primitive analog of number (‘numerosity’) is represented as opposed to number itself. We distinguish three arguments for these claims – the arguments from congruency, confounds, and imprecision – and show that none succeed. (...) We then highlight positive reasons for thinking that the ANS genuinely represents numbers. The upshot is that proponents of the orthodox view should not feel troubled by recent critiques of their position. (shrink)

In the 1980s, a number of philosophers argued that perception is analog. In the ensuing years, these arguments were forcefully criticized, leaving the thesis in doubt. This paper draws on Weber’s Law, a well-entrenched finding from psychophysics, to advance a new argument that perception is analog. This new argument is an adaptation of an argument that cognitive scientists have leveraged in support of the contention that primitive numerical representations are analog. But the argument here is extended to the representation of (...) non-numerical magnitudes, such as luminance and distance, and shown to apply to perception and not just cognition. The relevant sense of ‘analog’ is also clarified, and two powerful objections are addressed. Finally, the question whether perception’s analog vehicles are located in conscious experience is explored and related to a well-known controversy within psychophysics. (shrink)

Objective To review the way consciousness is operationalised in contemporary research, discuss strengths and weaknesses of current approaches and propose new measures. Method We first reviewed the literature pertaining to the phenomenal character of visual and self-consciousness as well as awareness of visual stimuli. We also reviewed more problematic cases of dreams and animal consciousness, specifically that of octopuses. Results Despite controversies, work in visual and self consciousness is highly developed and there are notable successes. Cases where experiences are not (...) induced, such as dreams, and where no verbal report is possible, such as when we study purported experiences of octopuses, are more challenging. It is difficult to be confident about the reliability and validity of operationalisations of dreams. Although this is a general concern about the measuring consciousness, it is not a sufficiently severe concern to completely undermine the work reviewed on vision and self-consciousness. It is more difficult to see how the good work on human psychology can be applied to non-human animals, especially those with radically different nervous systems, such as octopuses. Given the limitations of report-based operationalisations of consciousness, it is desirable to develop non-report-based measures, particularly for phenomenal qualities. We examine a number of possibilities and offer two possible approaches of varying degrees of practicality, the first based on combining quality space descriptions of phenomenal qualities and the notion of a “neural activation space” inherited from connectionist A.I., the second being a novel match to target approach Conclusion Consciousness is a multifacted phenomenon and requires a variety of operationalisations to be studied. (shrink)

Our perception of where touch occurs on our skin shapes our interactions with the world. Most accounts of cutaneous localisation emphasise spatial transformations from a skin-based reference frame into body-centred and external egocentric coordinates. We investigated another possible method of tactile localisation based on an intrinsic perception of ‘skin space’. The arrangement of cutaneous receptive fields (RFs) could allow one to track a stimulus as it moves across the skin, similarly to the way animals navigate using path integration. We applied (...) curved tactile motions to the hands of human volunteers. Participants identified the location midway between the start and end points of each motion path. Their bisection judgements were systematically biased towards the integrated motion path, consistent with the characteristic inward error that occurs in navigation by path integration. We thus showed that integration of continuous sensory inputs across several tactile RFs provides an intrinsic mechanism for spatial perception. (shrink)

Metacognition is the capacity to evaluate the success of one's own cognitive processes in various domains; for example, memory and perception. It remains controversial whether metacognition relies on a domain-general resource that is applied to different tasks or if self-evaluative processes are domain specific. Here, we investigated this issue directly by examining the neural substrates engaged when metacognitive judgments were made by human participants of both sexes during perceptual and memory tasks matched for stimulus and performance characteristics. By comparing patterns (...) of fMRI activity while subjects evaluated their performance, we revealed both domain-specific and domain-general metacognitive representations. Multivoxel activity patterns in anterior prefrontal cortex predicted levels of confidence in a domain-specific fashion, whereas domain-general signals predicting confidence and accuracy were found in a widespread network in the frontal and posterior midline. The demonstration of domain-specific metacognitive representations suggests the presence of a content-rich mechanism available to introspection and cognitive control. (shrink)

The overflow debate concerns this following question: does conscious iconic memory have a higher capacity than attention does? In recent years, Ned Block has been invoking empirical works to support the positive answer to this question. The view is called the “rich view” or the “Overflow view”. One central thread of this discussion concerns the nature of iconic memory: for example how rich they are and whether they are conscious. The first section discusses a potential misunderstanding of “visible persistence” in (...) this literature. The second section discusses varieties of attention relevant to this debate. The final section discusses the most prominent alternative interpretation of the Sperling paradigm—the postdiction interpretation—and explains how it can be made compatible with a weaker version of the rich or overflow view. (shrink)

In 1932, Rudolf Carnap published his article “Psychology in a Physical Language.” The article prompted a critical response by the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker. The exchange is marked by mutual lack of comprehension. In this paper I will provide a contextualized explication of the exchange. I will show that Carnap’s physicalism was deeply rooted in the psychophysical tradition that also informed Gestalt psychological research. By failing to acknowledge this, Carnap missed out on the possibility to enter into a serious debate (...) and to forge an alliance with a like-minded psychologist at the time. I conclude by suggesting that the kind of physicalism practiced by Gestalt psychologists deserves to be taken seriously by current philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

I use the distinction between perception and cognition to advance a novel account of visual shape and visual scale. 1. INTRODUCTION (Preface & Chapter 1) - I outline the distinction between perception and cognition, and give an overview of how cognitive influences were rejected, and later reincorporated back into, 3D vision. 2. VISUAL SHAPE (Chapter 2 & Chapter 3) - Traditional theories argue that 3D vision integrates binocular disparity, perspective, and shading into a single coherent percept. I argue instead that (...) visual shape is a two stage process, with perspective and shading only introduced at the level of cognition. 3. VISUAL SCALE (Chapter 4) - I argue that visual cues to scale are ineffective (vergence, accommodation, motion parallax, vertical disparities), limited in application (ground plane), or merely cognitive (familiar size), leading me to suggest that visual scale is purely cognitive. NOTE: The Preface, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2, are available on my website. Please email me for Chapters 3 and 4. The book is available on b-ok, but I take no responsibility for this site. (shrink)

This paper argues that a common form of representationalism has trouble accommodating empirical findings about visual space perception. Vision science tells us that the visual system systematically gives rise to different experiences of the same spatial property. This, combined with a naturalistic account of content, suggests that the same spatial property can have different veridical looks. I use this to argue that a common form of representationalism about spatial experience must be rejected. I conclude by considering alternatives to this view.

Pictures are 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scene-representing experiences from their viewers. In this essay, I argue that philosophers have tended to underestimate the relevance of research in vision science to understanding the nature of pictorial experience. Both the deeply entrenched methodology of virtual psychophysics as well as empirical studies of pictorial space perception provide compelling support for the view that pictorial experience and seeing face-to-face are experiences of the same psychological, explanatory kind. I also show that an empirically informed (...) account of pictorial experience provides resources to develop a novel, resemblance-based account of depiction. According to what I call the deep resemblance theory, pictures work by presenting virtual models of objects and scenes in phenomenally 3D, pictorial space. (shrink)

Colour constancy is a foundational and yet puzzling phenomenon. Standard appearance invariantism is threatened by the psychophysical matching argument, which is taken to favour variantism. This argument, however, is inconclusive. The data at best support a pluralist view: colour constancy is sometimes variantist, sometimes invariantist. I add another potential explanation of these data, complex invariantism, which adopts an atypical six-dimensional model of colour appearance. Finally I prospect for a unifying conception of constancy among two neglected notions: discriminatory colour constancy and (...) relational colour constancy. The former arguably marks a common core capacity that is present across widely differing viewing contexts. (shrink)

The idea of a common currency underlying our choice behaviour has played an important role in sciences of behaviour, from neurobiology to psychology and economics. However, while it has been mainly investigated in terms of values, with a common scale on which goods would be evaluated and compared, the question of a common scale for subjective probabilities and confidence in particular has received only little empirical investigation so far. The present study extends previous work addressing this question, by showing that (...) confidence can be compared across visual and auditory decisions, with the same precision as for the comparison of two trials within the same task. We discuss the possibility that confidence could serve as a common currency when describing our choices to ourselves and to others. others. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAmong the main targets of Bergson’s early work, Time and Free Will, are the claims of psychophysics that sensations of pain register degrees of force upon the body. If consciousness is comprised entirely of unextended qualities, and affection is a moment of consciousness, then affection must also be devoid of measurable quantities. With Matter and Memory, Bergson shifts away from the idea that sensation is completely unextended. Rather, he asserts that sensations are ‘vaguely localized’ on the plane of matter. However, (...) he does not address the question of whether this implies the need for a resuscitation of the notion that affection measures degrees of force emanating from the material world that was repudiated in Time and Free Will. In this essay, we ask whether there is not perhaps a place for a revised concept of force within the framework of the later work. These discussions also provide us with the opportunity to reflect upon Deleuze’s statement in Bergsonism that the present lacks an ontological status of its own. Against this assertion we argue that if affection indeed does involve the absorption of extended material forces, then it provides the basis for a restoration of an image of the real present within Bergson’s later thought. (shrink)

Critics have long complained that naive realism cannot adequately account for perceptual illusion. This complaint has a tendency to ally itself with the aspersion that naive 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 naive realist.

This chapter critically assesses recent arguments that acquiring the ability to categorize an object as belonging to a certain high-level kind can cause the relevant kind property to be represented in visual phenomenal content. The first two arguments, developed respectively by Susanna Siegel (2010) and Tim Bayne (2009), employ an essentially phenomenological methodology. The third argument, developed by William Fish (2013), by contrast, is supported by an array of psychophysical and neuroscientific findings. I argue that while none of these arguments (...) ultimately proves successful, there is a substantial body of empirical evidence that information originating outside the visual system can nonetheless modulate the way an object’s low-level attributes visually appear. Visual phenomenal content, I show, is not only significantly influenced by crossmodal interactions between vision and other exteroceptive senses such as touch and audition, but also by interactions between vision and non-perceptual systems involved in motor planning and construction of the proprioceptive body-image. (shrink)

DETERMINACY is the claim that covert shifts in visual attention sometimes affect the determinacy of visual content (capital letters will distinguish the claim from the familiar word, 'determinacy'). Representationalism is the claim that visual phenomenology supervenes on visual representational content. Both claims are popular among contemporary philosophers of mind, and DETERMINACY has been employed in defense of representationalism. I claim that existing arguments in favor of DETERMINACY are inconclusive. As a result, DETERMINACY-based arguments in support of representationalism are not strong (...) ones. (shrink)

This volume presents a critical edition of the previously unpublished correspondence between Franz Brentano and Gustav Fechner along with a detailed introduction to provide context. A total of 11 letters discuss in detail Brentano's critical arguments against Fechner s psychophysics in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.".

As the word “optics” was understood from antiquity into and beyond the early modern period, it did not mean simply the physics and geometry of light, but meant the “theory of vision” and included what we should now call physiological and psychological aspects. From antiquity, these aspects were subject to geometrical analysis. Accordingly, the geometry of visual experience has long been an object of investigation. This chapter examines accounts of size and distance perception in antiquity (Euclid and Ptolemy) and the (...) Middle Ages (Ibn al-Haytham), before turning to "natural geometry" in Kepler and Descartes. It finds a purely mechanical realization of natural geometry in Descartes (primarily in his L'Homme, 1664), in which he conceives states of the visual system as varying in accordance with distance, much as his geometrical compasses vary their spatial relations in accordance with geometrical proportions. This reading challenges the notion that a two-dimensional sensation (without three-dimensional phenomenality) was universally accepted prior to the nineteenth century by positing a direct psychophysiological account of the experience of distance in Descartes. It thereby challenges the interpretations of Descartes on natural geometry of George Berkeley, Nancy Maull, Margaret Wilson, Erwin Panofsky, and Jonathan Crary. (shrink)

This paper examines the origins and legacy of Titchener’s notion of stimulus error in the experimental study of sensory experience. It places Titchener’s introspective methods into the intellectual world of early experimental psychology. It follows the subsequent development of perceptual experimentation primarily in the American literature, with notice to British and German studies as needed. Subsequent investigators transformed the specific notion of a “stimulus error” into experimental questions in which subjects’ attitudes toward their perceptual tasks became independent variables to be (...) manipulated experimentally. Ultimately, these manipulations support a distinction between accessing phenomenal as opposed to cognitive aspects of subjects’ responses to perceived objects. (shrink)

The chapter begins with a sketch of the empirical, theoretical, and philosophical background to nineteenth-century theories of perception, focusing on visual perception. It then considers German sensory physiology and psychology in the nineteenth century and its reception. This section gives special attention to: assumptions about nerve–sensation relations; spatial perception; the question of whether there is a two-dimensional representation in visual experience; psychophysics; size constancy; and theories of colour perception. The chapter then offers a brief look at the interaction between perceptual (...) theory and philosophical issues in epistemology and the metaphysics of mind in Britain and America, focusing on: the notion of a muscle sense; the problem of the external world; and forms of perceptual realism. It ends with an overview of psychological theories of perception in the early twentieth century and the Gestalt reaction, culminating with J. J. Gibson. (shrink)

When visual attention is directed away from a stimulus, neural processing is weak and strength and precision of sensory data decreases. From a computational perspective, in such situations observers should give more weight to prior expectations in order to behave optimally during a discrimination task. Here we test a signal detection theoretic model that counter-intuitively predicts subjects will do just the opposite in a discrimination task with two stimuli, one attended and one unattended: when subjects are probed to discriminate the (...) unattended stimulus, they rely less on prior information about the probed stimulus’ identity. The model is in part inspired by recent findings that attention reduces trial-by-trial variability of the neuronal population response and that they use a common criterion for attended and unattended trials. In five different visual discrimination experiments, when attention was directed away from the target stimulus, subjects did not adjust their response bias in reaction to a change in stimulus presentation frequency despite being fully informed and despite the presence of performance feedback and monetary and social incentives. This indicates that subjects did not rely more on the priors under conditions of inattention as would be predicted by a Bayes-optimal observer model. These results inform and constrain future models of Bayesian inference in the human brain. (shrink)

Riemer’s recent paper on the perception of time discusses a neglected yet important topic in the psychological literature: the consequences for psychology (and psychophysics) from the ‘anisotropy’ of time. The paper presents an argument that there are unique kinds of challenges for psychophysics from such temporal anisotropy: (a) Challenges because the psychological experience of time has temporal anisotropy and the physical concept of time does not have temporal anisotropy. (b) Challenges for experimental research which are unique to temporal anisotropy. -/- (...) Although it is important to consider temporal anisotropy, I think there are reasons to deny the force of both kinds of challenges. (shrink)

Poorly saturated colors are closer to a pure grey than strongly saturated ones and, therefore, appear less “colorful”. Color saturation is effectively manipulated in the visual arts for balancing conflicting sensations and moods and for inducing the perception of relative distance in the pictorial plane. While perceptual science has proven quite clearly that the luminance contrast of any hue acts as a self-sufficient cue to relative depth in visual images, the role of color saturation in such figure-ground organization has remained (...) unclear. We presented configurations of colored inducers on grey ‘test’ backgrounds to human observers. Luminance and saturation of the inducers was uniform on each trial, but varied across trials. We ran two separate experimental tasks. In the relative background brightness task, perceptual judgments indicated whether the apparent brightness of the grey test background contrasted with, assimilated to, or appeared equal (no effect) to that of a comparison background with the same luminance contrast. Contrast polarity and its interaction with color saturation affected response proportions for contrast, assimilation and no effect. In the figure-ground task, perceptual judgments indicated whether the inducers appeared to lie in front of, behind, or in the same depth with the background. Strongly saturated inducers produced significantly larger proportions of foreground effects indicating that these inducers stand out as figure against the background. Weakly saturated inducers produced significantly larger proportions of background effects, indicating that these inducers are perceived as lying behind the backgrounds. We infer that color saturation modulates figure-ground organization, both directly by determining relative inducer depth, and indirectly, and in interaction with contrast polarity, by affecting apparent background brightness. The results point towards a hitherto undocumented functional role of color saturation in the genesis of form, and in particular figure-ground percepts in the absence of chromatostereopsis. (shrink)

Additional evidence is presented concerning the anisotropy between vertical and horizontal encoding, which emerges from studies of human perception and cognition of space in plane mirror reflections. Moreover, it is suggested that the non-metric characteristic of polarization is not limited to the vertical dimension.

A common objection to representationalism is that a representationalist view of phenomenal character cannot accommodate the effects that shifts in covert attention have on visual phenomenology: covert attention can make items more visually prominent than they would otherwise be without altering the content of visual experience. Recent empirical work on attention casts doubt on previous attempts to advance this type of objection to representationalism and it also points the way to an alternative development of the objection.

For over a century, the question of the relation of language to thought has been extensively discussed in the case of color categorization, where two main views prevail. The relativist view claims that color categories are relative while the universalistic view argues that color categories are universal. Relativists also argue that color categories are linguistically determined, and universalists that they are perceptually determined. Recently, the argument for the perceptual determination of color categorization has been undermined, and the relativist view has (...) regained some ground. This paper argues that although the universalistic account of color categorization has been called into question, this is not enough to establish relativism. Color categories can still be said to be universal or particular, independent of the accounts of their universality or relativity. Because of its polarization, the debate has disregarded some issues that are key in our understanding of color categorization: the question of what a color category is and how to identify it. (shrink)

Purpose – A key cybernetics concept, information transmitted in a system, was quantified by Shannon. It quickly gained prominence, inspiring a version by Harvard psychologists Garner and Hake for “absolute identification” experiments. There, human subjects “categorize” sensory stimuli, affording “information transmitted” in perception. The Garner-Hake formulation has been in continuous use for 62 years, exerting enormous influence. But some experienced theorists and reviewers have criticized it as uninformative. They could not explain why, and were ignored. Here, the “why” is answered. (...) The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – A key Shannon data-organizing tool is the confusion matrix. Its columns and rows are, respectively, labeled by “symbol sent” (event) and “symbol received” (outcome), such that matrix entries represent how often outcomes actually corresponded to events. Garner and Hake made their own version of the matrix, which deserves scrutiny, and is minutely examined here. Findings – The Garner-Hake confusion-matrix columns represent “stimulus categories”, ranges of some physical stimulus attribute (usually intensity), and its rows represent “response categories” of the subject’s identification of the attribute. The matrix entries thus show how often an identification empirically corresponds to an intensity, such that “outcomes” and “events” differ in kind (unlike Shannon’s). Obtaining a true “information transmitted” therefore requires stimulus categorizations to be converted to hypothetical evoking stimuli, achievable (in principle) by relating categorization to sensation to intensity. But those relations are actually unknown, perhaps unknowable. Originality/value – The author achieves an important understanding: why “absolute identification” experiments do not illuminate sensory processes. (shrink)

We show that true colors as defined by Chevreul (1839) produce unsuspected simultaneous brightness induction effects on their immediate grey backgrounds when these are placed on a darker (black) general background surrounding two spatially separated configurations. Assimilation and apparent contrast may occur in one and the same stimulus display. We examined the possible link between these effects and the perceived depth of the color patterns which induce them as a function of their luminance contrast. Patterns of square-shaped inducers of a (...) single color (red, green, blue, yellow, or grey) were placed on background fields of a lighter and a darker grey, presented on a darker screen. Inducers were always darker on one side of the display and brighter on the other in a given trial. The intensity of the grey backgrounds varied between trials only. This permitted generating four inducer luminance contrasts, presented in random order, for each color. Background fields were either spatially separated or consisted of a single grey field on the black screen. Experiments were run under three environmental conditions: dark-adaptation, daylight, and rod-saturation after exposure to bright light. In a first task, we measured probabilities of contrast, assimilation, and no effect in a three-alternative forced-choice procedure (background appears brighter on the ‘left’, on the ‘right’ or the ‘same’). Visual adaptation and inducer contrast had no significant influence on the induction effects produced by colored inducers. Achromatic inducers produced significantly stronger contrast effects after dark-adaptation, and significantly stronger assimilation in daylight conditions. Grouping two backgrounds into a single one was found to significantly decrease probabilities of apparent contrast. Under the same conditions, we measured probabilities of the inducers to be perceived as nearer to the observer inducers. These, as predicted by Chevreul’s law of contrast, were determined by the luminance contrast of the inducers only, with significantly higher probabilities of brighter inducers to be seen as nearer, and a marked asymmetry between effects produced by inducers of opposite sign. Implications of these findings for theories which attempt to link simultaneous induction effects to the relative depth of object surfaces in the visual field are discussed. (shrink)

The quantitative experimental scientific psychology that became prominent by the turn of the twentieth century grew from three main areas of intellectual inquiry. First and most directly, it arose out of the traditional psychology of the philosophy curriculum, as expressed in theories of mind and cognition. Second, it adopted the attitudes of the new natural philosophy of the scientific revolution, attitudes of empirically driven causal analysis and exact observation and experimentation. Third, it drew upon investigations of the senses. Natural philosophical (...) disciplines such as optics and acoustics treated the functioning of the senses. Optics, in particular, had from antiquity comprised a complete theory of vision, combining the physics, physiology, psychology, metaphysics, and epistemology of vision, using mathematical techniques where feasible. Within medicine, sensory physiology examined anatomy, physiology, and pathology. Philosophical psychology had long examined the senses as mental capacities connected with cognition and knowledge, and such discussions also heeded the new attitudes of natural philosophy. This chapter first examines the early relations of psychology to biology and characterizes various eighteenth-century loci of psychological thought. It then pursues nineteenth-century developments in Germany and Britain that culminate in the “new” psychology of the 1860s and 1870s. (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)

The term “perceptual constancy” was used by the Gestalt theorists in the early part of the twentieth century (e.g., Koffka 1935, 34, 90) to refer to the tendency of perception to remain invariant over changes of viewing distance, viewing angle, and conditions of illumination. This tendency toward constancy is remarkable: every change in the viewing distance, position, and illumination is necessarily accompanied by a change in the local proximal (retinal) stimulation, and yet perception remains relatively stable. The tendency toward perceptual (...) constancy encouraged the Gestalt theorists to look beyond local proximal stimulation in grounding their theories of perception. In the ensuing decades, much has been learned about the constancies. Evidence for this assertion may be found in the contributions to the current volume as well as in earlier volumes (e.g., Epstein 1977; Walsh and Kulikowsky 1998). These advances notwithstanding, significant questions remain open. Our aim here is to note some advances and specify some open questions. (shrink)

Why do we draw the boundaries between “blue” and “green”, where we do? One proposed answer to this question is that we categorize color the way we do because we perceive color categorically. Starting in the 1950’s, the phenomenon of “categorical perception” (CP) encouraged such a response. CP refers to the fact that adjacent color patches are more easily discriminated when they straddle a category boundary than when they belong to the same category. In this paper, I make three related (...) claims. (1) Although what seems to guide discrimination performances seems to indeed be categorical information, the evidence in favor of the fact that categorical perception infl uences the way we perceive color is not convincing. (2) That CP offers a useful account of categorization is not obvious.While aiming at accounting for categorization, CP itself requires an account of categories. This being said, CP remains an interesting phenomenon. Why and how is our discrimination behavior linked to our categories? It is suggested that linguistic labels determine CP through a naming strategy to which participants resort while discriminating colors. This paper’s fi nal point is (3) that the naming strategy account is not enough. Beyond category labels, what seems to guide discrimination performance is category structure. (shrink)

In the foundations of Fechner's psychophysics, the concept of “functional relation” plays a highly relevant role in three different respects: (1) in respect to the principles of measurement, (2) in respect to the mind-body problem, and (3) in respect to the concept of a law of nature. In all three cases, it is important to explain the difference between a functional dependency of a variable upon another and a causal relationship between two (or more) variables. In all three respects, Ernst (...) Mach developed Fechner's ideas further and tried to extend the lessons he had learned from using the concept of a functional relation in psychophysics to the whole of science. For all three cases, I explain why they are still relevant for psychophysics and philosophy today. (shrink)

In past and modern psychophysics there are several unresolved methodological and philosophical problems of human and animal perception, including the outstanding question of the relational basis of whole psychophysics. Here the main issue is discussed: if, and to what extent, there are viable bridges between the traditional “gestalt” oriented approaches and the modern perceptual-cognitive perspectives in psychophysics. Thereby the key concept of psychological “frame of reference” is presented by pointing to Hermann Ebbinghaus' geometric-optical illusions, on the one hand, and Max (...) Wertheimer's treatment of the traditional transposition phenomenon, on the other hand. A much-needed theoretical reorientation of future research may help to overcome the philosophical narrowness of present-day human and comparative psychophysics. (shrink)

In Fechner's psychophysics, the 'mental' and the 'physical' were conceived as two phenomenal domains, connected by functional relations, not as two ontologically different realms. We follow the path from Fechner's foundational ideas and Mach's radical programme of a unitary science to later approaches to primary, psychophysically neutral experience (phenomenology, protophysics). We propose an 'integral psychophysics' as a mathematical study of law-like, invariant structures of primary experience. This approach is illustrated by a reinterpretation of psychophysical experiments in terms of perceptual situations (...) involving a constructed apparatus and an instructed subject. The problematic notion of 'measurement of sensation' is thus eliminated: 'sensations' are merely indices for classes of perceptually equivalent configurations (states of the apparatus) specified by the instruction. The locus of the measured is in the inter-subjectively shared, communicable world—not inside the subject's mind. Finally we discuss the role of integral psychophysics as a scientia prima , logically and methodically preceding physics and psychology. (shrink)

This chapter reconsiders the notion of perceptual constancy from the ground up. It distinguishes the phenomenology of perceptual constancy and stability from a functional characterization of perception as aiming at full constancy. Drawing on this distinction, we can attend to the phenomenology of constancy itself, and ask to what extent human perceivers attain constancy, as usually defined. Within this phenomenology, I distinguish phenomenal presentations of spatial features and color properties from categorizations, conceptualizations, and judgments that underlie verbal or other responses (...) to those presentations. Although phenomenal presentation and categorization commonly co-occur, they are distinct aspects of experience. After reviewing several standard descriptions of constancy, I present laboratory findings and my own phenomenological descriptions by way of confirming that, although perception "tends toward" constancy, human perceivers do not usually attain full constancy for either spatial or chromatic properties (as many investigators acknowledge). For spatial perception, I find that the phenomenology has been systematically misdescribed, and I offer a more adequate description of the phenomenology of everyday spatial perception. However, my greatest quarrel with previous theory concerns the functional aim of the constancies. I argue not only that perception does not achieve full constancy but that we should not characterize it as aiming for full constancy. Rather, perception seeks a stability of representation suitable for guiding our actions and which can also, as needed, enable us to classify and re-identify objects by phenomenally presented properties such as shape, size, or color. Further, I argue that theorists should not confuse these classifications with the qualitative character of phenomenal experience. My arguments underscore the need to distinguish phenomenal representation (better, "presentation") from conceptual categorization, and to distinguish perceptual presentations from subsequent processes that are involved in responding to them. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by Alva Noë (2004). I argue inter alia that the enactive account falsely identifies an object’s apparent shape with its 2D perspectival shape; that it mistakenly assimilates visual shape perception and volumetric object recognition; and that it seriously misrepresents the constitutive role of bodily action in visual awareness. I argue further that noticing an object’s perspectival shape involves a hybrid experience combining both perceptual and imaginative elements (...) – an act of what I call ‘make-perceive.’. (shrink)