According to an influential view, the detection of action possibilities and the selection of a plan for action are two segregated steps throughout the processing of visual information. This classical approach is committed with the assumption that two independent types of processing underlie visual perception: the semantic one, which is at the service of the identification of visually presented objects, and the pragmatic one which serves the execution of actions directed to specific parts of the same objects. However, as our (...) knowledge of vision has improved over the years, this established view has turned out to be only an approximation. This paper sets out the details of a non-modularist approach to visual perception of action possibilities and explains how to resist the lure of cognitive segregation. (shrink)

Post-Gibson attempts to set out a definition of affordance generally agree that this notion can be understood as a property of the environment with salience for an organism’s behavior. According to this view, some scholars advocate the idea that affordances are dispositional properties of physical objects that, given suitable circumstances, necessarily actualize related actions. This paper aims at assessing this statement in light of a theory of affordance perception. After years of discontinuity between strands of empirical and theoretical research, the (...) time is ripe for addressing the question of whether the dispositional interpretation of affordance is in accordance with some recent evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience. Following this line, I clarify that there are some cases of affordance-related effects that neither require the actualization of an action, nor the presence of an action-related property bearer in the environment, and that the identification of affordance with physical properties provides only a partial explanation of the wide range of affordance-related effects. Accordingly, I argue in favor of a more general account of affordance perception based on the ability to directly detect perceptual patterns in the environment. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to argue for two main and related points. First, I want to defend Richard Wollheim’s well-known thesis that the twofold mental state of seeing-in is the distinctive pictorial experience that marks figurativity. Figurativity is what makes a representation pictorial, a depiction of its subject. Moreover, I want to show that insofar as it is a mark of figurativity, all seeing-in is inflected. That is to say, every mental state of seeing-in is such that the characterisation (...) of the properties by which a certain subject is seen in a given picture as having refers to the design properties of the picture’s vehicle, i.e., to the visible surface properties of that vehicle that are responsible for the fact that one such subject is seen in it, precisely taken in such a design role. Finally, I will try to show that seeing-in is qualified by inflection independently of whether it is conscious or unconscious seeing-in. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss several proposals for how to find out which contents visual experiences have, and I defend the method I.

Do spatial features appear the same whether they are perceived through vision or touch? This question is at stake in the puzzle that William Molyneux posed to John Locke, concerning whether a man born blind whose sight was restored would be able immediately to identify the shapes of the things he saw. A recent study purports to answer the question negatively, but I argue here that the subjects of the study likely could not see well enough for the result to (...) have been meaningful. I then propose a way to improve the study, by including cues from object motion. (shrink)

It has been claimed that photographs are transparent: we see through them; we literally see the photographed object through the photograph. Whether this claim is true depends on the way we conceive of seeing. There has been a controversy about whether localizing the perceived object in one's egocentric space is a necessary feature of seeing, as if it is, then photographs are unlikely to be transparent. I would like to propose and defend another, much weaker, necessary condition for seeing: I (...) argue that it is necessary for seeing that there is at least one way for me to move such that if I were to move this way, my view of the perceived object would change continuously as I move. Since this condition is not satisfied in the case of seeing objects in photographs, photographs are not transparent. (shrink)

While there has been a lot of discussion of picture perception both in perceptual psychology and in philosophy, these discussions are driven by very different background assumptions. Nonetheless, it would be mutually beneficial to arrive at an understanding of picture perception that is informed by both the philosophers’ and the psychologists’ story. The aim of this paper is exactly this: to give an account of picture perception that is valid both as a philosophical and as a psychological account. I argue (...) that seeing trompe l’oeil paintings is, just as some philosophers suggested, different from other cases of picture perception. Further, the way our perceptual system functions when seeing trompe l’oeil paintings could be an important piece of the psychological explanation of perceiving pictures. (shrink)

I aim to give a new account of picture perception: of the way our visual system functions when we see something in a picture. My argument relies on the functional distinction between the ventral and dorsal visual subsystems. I propose that it is constitutive of picture perception that our ventral subsystem attributes properties to the depicted scene, whereas our dorsal subsystem attributes properties to the picture surface. This duality elucidates Richard Wollheim’s concept of the “twofoldness” of our experience of pictures: (...) the “visual awareness not only of what is represented but also of the surface qualities of the representation.” I argue for the following four claims: (a) the depicted scene is represented by ventral perception, (b) the depicted scene is not represented by dorsal perception, (c) the picture surface is represented by dorsal perception, and (d) the picture surface is not necessarily represented by ventral perception. (shrink)

When we see something in a picture, do we enjoy visual experience as of the depicted object? Gombrichians say yes: when viewing ordinary pictures we simultaneously see the picture and seem to see its object. But why, then, isn’t seeing-in contradictory, and how are these two elements somehow integrated into a single experience? Gombrichians’ attempts to answer appeal either to our awareness of the picture’s design, or to the idea that picture and object are not given as in the same (...) place. I argue that neither answer is successful, and thus that Gombrichianism is false. (shrink)

b>: The problem of how physical systems, such as brains, come to represent themselves as subjects in an objective world is addressed. I develop an account of the requirements for this ability that draws on and refines work in a philosophical tradition that runs from Kant through Peter Strawson to Gareth Evans. The basic idea is that the ability to represent oneself as a subject in a world whose existence is independent of oneself involves the ability to represent space, and (...) in particular, to represent oneself as one object among others in an objective spatial realm. In parallel, I provide an account of how this ability, and the mechanisms that support it, are realized neurobiologically. This aspect of the article draws on, and refines, work done in the neurobiology and psychology of egocentric and allocentric spatial representation. (shrink)

Everyday visual experience constantly confronts us with things we can interact with in the real world. We literally feel the outside presence of physical objects in our environment via visual perceptual experience. The visual feeling of presence is a crucial feature of vision that is largely unexplored in the philosophy of perception, and poorly debated in vision neuroscience. The aim of this article is to investigate the feeling of presence. I suggest that visual feeling of presence depends on the visual (...) representation of a very particular spatial relation with the object we interact with: the visual representation of absolute egocentric depth, which is due to stereoscopic vision. (shrink)

Everyday life suggests that picture seeing is sometimes infused by an emotional charge. However, nobody has addressed the importance of explaining this emotional charge in picture perception. Even our best model of picture perception, the dorsal/ventral account of picture perception, which integrates the most important empirical results coming from our best model on vision in neuroscience, the two visual systems model, lacks a reference to this emotional charge. The aim of the present paper is to offer an account of picture (...) perception that is able to regain and explain this neglected emotional charge. My claim is that, as for face-to-face perception, during picture perception, we are not only in a visual perceptual state, but also in an emotional state, which is directly connected to our visual perceptual state. I also show that it is possible to offer this integration while remaining in the philosophical/empirical framework of the dorsal/ventral account of picture perception, whose explanatory power is confirmed and improved. (shrink)

The central thesis (CT) that this paper upholds is that a picture depicts an object by generating in those who view the picture a visual experience of that object. I begin by presenting a brief sketch of intentionalism, the theory of perception in terms of which I propose to account for pictorial experience. I then discuss Richard Wollheim’s twofoldness thesis and explain why it should be rejected. Next, I show that the socalled unique phenomenology of pictorial experience is simply an (...) instance of perceptual indeterminacy. Lastly, I discuss a phenomenon associated with pictures that could be considered a problem for CT, and account for it by invoking the thesis that visual experience is cognitively penetrable. (shrink)

Recent work on seeing-in has taken a pluralist turn. There is variety among pictures, so we should expect variety among seeing-in. Dominic Lopes’s taxonomy of seeing-in is arguably the most thorough that is currently available. Lopes identifies five varieties of seeing-in. In this paper I identify a sixth: pseudo-actualism. This paper improves our current best taxonomy of seeing-in.

It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions. Yet this assumption has been challenged by proponents of the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis , according to which visuomotor programming is the responsibility of a “zombie” processing stream whose sources of bottom-up spatial information are entirely non-conscious . In many formulations of TVSH, the role of conscious vision in action is limited to “recognizing objects, selecting (...) targets for action, and determining what kinds of action, broadly speaking, to perform” . Our aim in this study is to show that the available evidence not only fails to support this dichotomous view but actually reveals a significant role for conscious vision in motor programming, especially for actions that require deliberate attention. (shrink)

Two experiments, one on school-aged children and one on adults, explored the mechanisms underlying responses to an image prime followed by graspable objects that were, in certain cases, dangerous. Participants were presented with different primes and objects representing two risk levels . The task required that a natural/artifact categorization task be performed by pressing different keys. In both adults and children graspable objects activated a facilitating motor response, while dangerous objects evoked aversive affordances, generating an interference-effect. Both children and adults (...) were sensitive to the distinction between biological and non-biological hands, however detailed resonant mechanisms related to the hand-prime gender emerged only in adults. Implications for how the concept of “dangerous object” develops and the relationship between resonant mechanisms and perception of danger are discussed. (shrink)

Depiction is the form of representation distinctive of figurative paintings, drawings, and photographs. Accounts of depiction attempt to specify the relation something must bear to an object in order to depict it. Resemblance accounts hold that the notion of resemblance is necessary to the specification of this relation. Several difficulties with such analyses have led many philosophers to reject the possibility of an adequate resemblance account of depiction. This essay outlines these difficulties and argues that current resemblance accounts succumb to (...) them. It then develops an alternative resemblance account, drawing on Grice's account of nonnatural meaning and its role in determining sentence meaning to argue that something depicts an object if it bears intention-based resemblances to the object that jointly capture its overall appearance. In addition to solving the metaphysical problem of what it is for something to depict an object, this account also sheds significant light on the epistemological issue of how we are able to work out that something depicts an object. This essay argues that our ability to work out that something depicts an object results from both our more general ability to identify intentions from the products of communicative behavior and our knowledge of stylistic conventions. This account avoids the difficulties that face rival attempts to analyze depiction in terms of resemblance. It also clarifies and explains the features that distinguish depictive from nondepictive representation. (shrink)

This paper outlines a ‘perceptual account’ of depiction. It centrally contrasts with experiential accounts of depiction in that seeing something in a picture is understood as a visual experience of something present in the picture, rather than as a visual experience of something absent. The experience of a picture is in this respect akin to a veridical rather than hallucinatory perceptual experience on a perceptual account. Thus, the central selling-point of a perceptual account is that it allows taking at face (...) value the intuitive claim that we see things in pictures. Preserving this claim has a potential cost, however: we need to postulate that some kind of thing, T, is present in the realm of the picture, and it is not straightforward to find a plausible type of entity to play this role. The paper examines three alternative choices of T; T may be a material object, a visual appearance or a universal. (shrink)

First published in 1995, The Visual Brain in Action remains a seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. It presents a model for understanding the visual processing underlying perception and action, proposing a broad distinction within the brain between two kinds of vision: conscious perception and unconscious 'online' vision. It argues that each kind of vision can occur quasi-independently of the other, and is separately handled by a quite different processing system. In the 11 years since publication, the book has provoked (...) considerable interest and debate - throughout both cognitive neuroscience and philosophy, while the field has continued to flourish and develop. -/- For this new edition, the text from the original edition has been left untouched, standing as a coherent statement of the authors' position. However, a very substantial epilogue has been added to the book in which Milner and Goodale review some of the key developments that support or challenge the views that were put forward in the first edition. The new chapter summarizes developments in various relevant areas of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour. It notably supplements the main text by updating the reader on the contributions that have emerged from the use of functional neuroimaging, which was in its infancy when the first edition was written. Neuroimaging, and functional MRI in particular, has revolutionized the field over the past 11 years by allowing investigators to plot in detail the patterns of activity within the visual brains of behaving and perceiving humans. The authors show how its use now allows scientists to test and confirm their proposals, based as they then were largely on evidence accrued from primate neuroscience in conjunction with studies of neurological patients. (shrink)