About this topic
Summary Psychophysics is a branch of psychology founded by Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), a German scientist and philosopher. In its contemporary manifestation, psychophysics investigates the correlations between physical stimulus properties on the one hand and sensations, perceptions, and perceptually-guided behaviors on the other (a psychophysicist might ask, for example, how the manipulation of the lighting conditions or the visual angle changes her subject’s perception of the color of a target). Evidence from psychophysical experiments is relevant to many debates in philosophy of perception, including those concerning cognitive penetrability, the perspectival aspect of perception, and the nature and function of color vision.  
Introductions Texts providing historical background include Hatfield 2015 and Hatfield 2012. Jorge & Chaz 2023 review recent empirical (incl. psychophysical) work inspired by philosophy of perception.
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  1. The metaperceptual function: Exploring dissociations between confidence and task performance with type 2 psychometric curves.Brian Maniscalco, Olenka Graham Castaneda, Brian Odegaard, Jorge Morales, Sivananda Rajananda & Megan Peters - manuscript
    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 (...)
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  2. Distal Content in Informational Teleosemantics: Challenges from Colour Constancy and Colour Chemistry.Lance Balthazar - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    In general, visual experiences represent determinately. And visual experiences, generally, represent properties of distal objects like their colour, shape, and size, but they do not, generally, represent properties of proximal states like that of incoming light or the retina. By making perceptual constancies central to perceptual representation, Peter Schulte extends Karen Neander’s Causal-Informational Teleosemantic theory in order to accommodate these facts. However, by appealing to the psychophysics and chemistry of how light-related properties interact to produce stimulation to the visual system (...)
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  3. The Pain System is Not a Bodily Disturbance Detector.Tiina Carita Rosenqvist - forthcoming - In Ana Cuevas Badallo, Mariano Martín-Villuendas & Juan Gefaell (eds.), Life and Mind: Theoretical and Applied Issues in Contemporary Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences. Cham: Springer.
    What is the function of pain? A popular view in contemporary philosophy is that the pain system is a bodily disturbance detector: pain states track/detect and represent bodily disturbances and the phenomenal character of the (sensory dimension of) pain supervenes on this representational content. The view can accommodate paradigmatic pain cases, e.g., when pain follows from stepping on a nail. Once we consider more complex pain phenomena, however, it has seemingly little to offer. In this paper, I discuss dissociation between (...)
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  4. Is Pain Modular?Laurenz Casser & Sam Clarke - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):828-46.
    We suggest that pain processing has a modular architecture. We begin by motivating the (widely assumed but seldom defended) conjecture that pain processing comprises inferential mechanisms. We then note that pain exhibits a characteristic form of judgement independence. On the assumption that pain processing is inferential, we argue that its judgement independence is indicative of modular (encapsulated) mechanisms. Indeed, we go further, suggesting that it renders the modularity of pain mechanisms a default hypothesis to be embraced pending convincing counterevidence. Finally, (...)
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  5. Metacognitive Psychophysics in Humans, Animals, and AI: A Research Agenda for Mapping Introspective Systems.Stephen M. Fleming - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):113-128.
    Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) propose an exciting new research programme on the computational form of introspective systems. Pursuing this goal requires measures that can isolate introspective capacity from response biases and first-order processes. I suggest that metacognitive psychophysics is well placed to meet this challenge, allowing the mapping of introspective architectures in humans, animals, and artificial systems.
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  6. Color and Competence: A New View of Color Perception.Tiina Rosenqvist - 2023 - In José Manuel Viejo & Mariano Sanjuán (eds.), Life and Mind - New Directions in the Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences. Springer. pp. 73-103.
    I have two main goals in this paper. My first goal is to sketch a new view of color perception. The core of the view can be expressed in the following two theses: (i) the overarching function of color vision is to enable and enhance the manifestation of relevant (species-specific) competences and (ii) color experiences are correct when they result from processing that directly and non-accidentally subserves the manifestation of such competences. My second goal is to show that the view (...)
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  7. Color, Competence, and Correctness.Tiina Carita Rosenqvist - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania
    The mainstream view in contemporary analytic philosophy is that perception is primarily in the business of representing the mind-independent world as it is. My dissertation explores an alternative conception: that the goal of perception is to guide successful action and that perceptions do not need to track mind-independent properties to play this action-guiding role. I focus on two types of perception: color perception and pain perception. I start with the former and advocate a pragmatist, empirically-guided approach which begins by inquiring (...)
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  8. Seeing with Color: Psychophysics and the function of color vision.Tiina Carita Rosenqvist - 2023 - Synthese 202 (1):1-24.
    What is the function of color vision? In this paper, I focus on perceptual phenomena studied in psychophysics and argue that the best explanation for these phenomena is that the color visual system is a perceptual enhancement system. I first introduce two rival conceptions of the function of color vision: that color vision aims to detect or track the fine-grained colors of distal objects and scenes (Seeing Color) and that it aims to help organisms discriminate, detect, track and/or recognize ecologically (...)
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  9. Erica Fretwell, Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling.Jorge Castro-Tejerina - 2022 - Centaurus 64 (1):293-296.
  10. Mapping the Visual Icon.Sam Clarke - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (3):552-577.
    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 (...)
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  11. Beyond the icon: Core cognition and the bounds of perception.Sam Clarke - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (1):94-113.
    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, (...)
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  12. Discrediting the "discrediting" of psychophysics: H.K. Beecher versus the Hardy-Wolff-Goodell dolorimeter.Lance Nizami & Claire S. Barnes - 2022 - In G. R. Patching (ed.), Fechner Day 2022: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics. Lund, Sweden: pp. 94-99.
    In 1947, Hardy, Wolff, and Goodell achieved a psychophysics milestone: they built a putative sensation-growth scale, for skin pain, from pain-difference limens. Limens were found using the “dolorimeter”, a device first made by Hardy & co. to evoke pain for pain-threshold measurements. Scant years later, though, H.K. Beecher (MD) discredited the pain scale – according to Paterson (2019), citing the historian Tousignant. Yet Hardy & co. receive approval in the literature. Intrigued, we scrutinized their methods, then Beecher’s critiques, and Tousignant’s (...)
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  13. Fechner Day 2022: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics.G. R. Patching (ed.) - 2022
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  14. The science of color and color vision.Alex Byrne & David R. Hilbert - 2021 - In Fiona Macpherson & Derek Brown (eds.), Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Colour. London: Routledge.
    A survey of color science and color vision.
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  15. The effect of action on perceptual feature binding.Inci Ayhan, Melisa Kurtcan & Lucas Thorpe - 2020 - Vision Research 177:97-108.
    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 (...)
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  16. Does the number sense represent number?Sam Clarke & Jacob Beck - 2020 - In Blair Armstrong, Stephanie Denison, Michael Mack & Yang Xu (eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
    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. (...)
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  17. Use Your Illusion: Spatial Functionalism, Vision Science, and the Case Against Global Skepticism.E. J. Green & Gabriel Oak Rabin - 2020 - Analytic Philosophy 61 (4):345-378.
  18. Perception is Analog: The Argument from Weber's Law.Jacob Beck - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (6):319-349.
    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 (...)
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  19. How to operationalise consciousness.Glenn Carruthers, Sidney Carls-Diamante, Linus Huang, Melanie Rosen & Elizabeth Schier - 2019 - Australian Journal of Psychology 71:390-410.
    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 (...)
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  20. A mechanism for spatial perception on human skin.Francesca Fardo, Brianna Beck, Tony Cheng & Patrick Haggard - 2018 - Cognition 178 (C):236-243.
    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 (...)
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  21. Domain-general and Domain-specific Patterns of Activity Support Metacognition in Human Prefrontal Cortex.Jorge Morales, Hakwan Lau & Stephen M. Fleming - 2018 - The Journal of Neuroscience 38 (14):3534-3546.
    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 (...)
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  22. Iconic Memory and Attention in the Overflow Debate.Tony Cheng - 2017 - Cogent Psychology 4 (1):01-11.
    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 (...)
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  23. Physicalism, Introspection, and Psychophysics: The Carnap/duncker Exchange.Uljana Feest - 2017 - In Marcus P. Adams, Zvi Biener, Uljana Feest & Jacqueline Anne Sullivan (eds.), Eppur Si Muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer: A Collection of Essays in Honor of Peter Machamer. Dordrecht: Springer.
    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 (...)
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  24. The Perception and Cognition of Visual Space.Paul Linton - 2017 - Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
    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 (...)
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  25. Space Perception, Visual Dissonance and the Fate of Standard Representationalism.Farid Masrour - 2017 - Noûs 51 (3):565-593.
    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.
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  26. The nature of correlation perception in scatterplots.Ronald A. Rensink - 2017 - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 24 (3):776-797.
    For scatterplots with gaussian distributions of dots, the perception of Pearson correlation r can be described by two simple laws: a linear one for discrimination, and a logarithmic one for perceived magnitude (Rensink & Baldridge, 2010). The underlying perceptual mechanisms, however, remain poorly understood. To cast light on these, four different distributions of datapoints were examined. The first had 100 points with equal variance in both dimensions. Consistent with earlier results, just noticeable difference (JND) was a linear function of the (...)
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  27. Depiction, Pictorial Experience, and Vision Science.Robert Briscoe - 2016 - Philosophical Topics 44 (2):43-81.
    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 (...)
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  28. Colour Constancy, Illumination, and Matching.Will Davies - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (4):540-562.
    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 (...)
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  29. Confidence as a common currency between vision and audition.Vincent de Gardelle, Francois Le Corre & Pascal Mamassian - 2016 - PLoS ONE 11 (1).
    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 (...)
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  30. The force of the present: a Bergsonian challenge to psychophysics.Allen Thomas Jones - 2016 - International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 77 (4-5):252-272.
    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, (...)
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  31. Naive Realism and the Science of (Some) Illusions.Ian Phillips - 2016 - Philosophical Topics 44 (2):353-380.
    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.
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  32. Vorwort.Franz Antonelli - 2015 - In Gustav Theodor Fechner & Franz Brentano (eds.), Briefwechsel Über Psychophysik, 1874-1878. Boston: De Gruyter.
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  33. Ein unveröffentlichtes Kapitel der Philosophieund Psychologiegeschichte.Mauro Antonelli - 2015 - In Gustav Theodor Fechner & Franz Brentano (eds.), Briefwechsel Über Psychophysik, 1874-1878. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 3-74.
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  34. Cognitive Penetration and the Reach of Phenomenal Content.Robert Briscoe - 2015 - In Athanassios Raftopoulos & John Zeimbekis (eds.), Cognitive Penetrability. Oxford University Press.
    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 (...)
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  35. Gombrich and the Duck-Rabbit.Robert Eamon Briscoe - 2015 - In Michael Beaney, Brendan Harrington & Dominic Shaw (eds.), Aspect Perception After Wittgenstein: Seeing-as and Novelty. New York: Routledge. pp. 49-88.
  36. Representationalism and the determinacy of visual content.Ben Bronner - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (2):227-239.
    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 (...)
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  37. The physiology of the sense organs and early neo-Kantian conceptions of objectivity.Scott Edgar - 2015 - In Flavia Padovani, Alan Richardson & Jonathan Y. Tsou (eds.), Objectivity in Science: New Perspectives From Science and Technology Studies. Cham: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 310. Springer. pp. 101-122.
  38. Briefwechsel Über Psychophysik, 1874-1878.Gustav Theodor Fechner & Franz Brentano - 2015 - Boston: De Gruyter.
    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.".
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  39. Briefe.Gustav Theodor Fechner & Franz Brentano - 2015 - In Gustav Theodor Fechner & Franz Brentano (eds.), Briefwechsel Über Psychophysik, 1874-1878. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 81-117.
  40. Aus einem Brief von Franz Brentano an Carl Stumpf.Gustav TheodorHG Fechner & Franz Brentano - 2015 - In Gustav Theodor Fechner & Franz Brentano (eds.), Briefwechsel Über Psychophysik, 1874-1878. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 120-122.
  41. On Natural Geometry and Seeing Distance Directly in Descartes.Gary Hatfield - 2015 - In Vincenzo De Risi (ed.), Mathematizing Space: The Objects of Geometry from Antiquity to the Early Modern Age. Birkhäuser. pp. 157-91.
    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 (...)
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  42. Objectifying the phenomenal in experimental psychology: Titchener and beyond.Gary Hatfield - 2015 - Philosophia Scientiae 19 (3):73-94.
    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 (...)
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  43. Perception in Philosophy and Psychology in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries.Gary Hatfield - 2015 - In Mohan Matthen (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception. Oxford University Press. pp. 100–117.
    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 (...)
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  44. Low attention impairs optimal incorporation of prior knowledge in perceptual decisions.Jorge Morales, Guillermo Solovey, Brian Maniscalco, Dobromir Rahnev, Floris P. de Lange & Hakwan Lau - 2015 - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics 77 (6):2021-2036.
    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 (...)
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  45. The psychophysics of order and anisotropy: Comment on Riemer.Sean Enda Power - 2015 - Consciousness and Cognition 38:198-204.
    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. -/- (...)
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  46. Do Intentions for Action Penetrate Visual Experience?Robert Briscoe - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5:1-2.
  47. Effects of saturation and contrast polarity on the figure-ground organization of color on gray.Birgitta Dresp-Langley & Adam Reeves - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5:1-9.
    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 (...)
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  48. Anisotropy and polarization of space: Evidence from naïve optics and phenomenological psychophysics.Ivana Bianchi & Marco Bertamini - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (5):545-546.
    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.
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  49. Visual Prominence and Representationalism.Todd Ganson & Ben Bronner - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 164 (2):405-418.
    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.
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  50. Proving universalism wrong does not prove relativism right: Considerations on the ongoing color categorization debate.Yasmina Jraissati - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology (3):1-24.
    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 (...)
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