What determines what we see? In contrast to the traditional "modular" understanding of perception, according to which visual processing is encapsulated from higher-level cognition, a tidal wave of recent research alleges that states such as beliefs, desires, emotions, motivations, intentions, and linguistic representations exert direct top-down influences on what we see. There is a growing consensus that such effects are ubiquitous, and that the distinction between perception and cognition may itself be unsustainable. We argue otherwise: none of these hundreds of studies - either individually or collectively - provide compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or "cognitive penetrability". In particular, and despite their variety, we suggest that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls. And whereas abstract theoretical challenges have failed to resolve this debate in the past, our presentation of these pitfalls is empirically anchored: in each case, we show not only how certain studies could be susceptible to the pitfall (in principle), but how several alleged top-down effects actually are explained by the pitfall (in practice). Moreover, these pitfalls are perfectly general, with each applying to dozens of other top-down effects. We conclude by extracting the lessons provided by these pitfalls into a checklist that future work could use to convincingly demonstrate top-down effects on visual perception. The discovery of substantive top-down effects of cognition on perception would revolutionize our understanding of how the mind is organized; but without addressing these pitfalls, no such empirical report will license such exciting conclusions. Language: en

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Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for "top-down" effects.

A tidal wave of recent research purports to have discovered that higher-level states such as moods, action capabilities, and categorical knowledge can literally and directly affect how things look. Are these truly effects on perception, or might some instead reflect influences on judgment, memory, or response bias? Here, we exploited an infamous art-historical reasoning error (the so-called “El Greco fallacy”) to demonstrate that multiple alleged top-down effects (including effects of morality on lightness perception and effects of action capabilities on spatial perception) cannot truly be effects on perception. We suggest that this error may also contaminate several other varieties of top-down effects and that this discovery has implications for debates over the continuity (or lack thereof) of perception and cognition.

“Top-Down” Effects Where None Should Be Found The El Greco Fallacy in Perception Research

A chief goal of perception is to help us navigate our environment. According to a rich and ambitious theory of spatial perception, the visual system achieves this goal not by aiming to accurately depict the external world, but instead by actively distorting the environment's perceived spatial layout to bias action selection toward favorable outcomes. Scores of experimental results have supported this view-including, famously, a report that wearing a heavy backpack makes hills look steeper. This perspective portrays the visual system as unapologetically paternalistic: Backpacks make hills harder to climb, so vision steepens them to discourage ascent. The "paternalistic" theory of spatial perception has, understandably, attracted controversy; if true, it would radically revise our understanding of how and why we see. Here, this view is subjected to a kind and degree of scrutiny it has yet to face. After characterizing and motivating the case for paternalistic vision, I expose several unexplored defects in its theoretical framework, arguing that extant accounts of how and why spatial perception is ability-sensitive are deeply problematic and that perceptual phenomenology belies the view's claims. The paternalistic account of spatial perception not only isn't true-it couldn't be true, even if its empirical findings were accepted at face value.

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How "Paternalistic" Is Spatial Perception? Why Wearing a Heavy Backpack Doesn't— and Couldn't—Make Hills Look Steeper

Embodied cognition is a theoretical framework which posits that cognitive function is intimately intertwined with the body and physical actions. Although the field of psychology is increasingly accepting embodied cognition as a viable theory, it has rarely been employed in the gerontological literature. However, embodied cognition would appear to have explanatory power for aging research given that older adults typically manifest concurrent physical and mental changes, and that research has indicated a correlative relationship between such changes. The current paper reviews age-related changes in sensory processing, mental representation, and the action-perception relationship, exploring how each can be understood through the lens of embodied cognition. Compared to younger adults, older adults exhibit across all three domains an increased tendency to favor visual processing over bodily factors, leading to the conclusion that older adults are less embodied than young adults. We explore the significance of this finding in light of existing theoretical models of aging and argue that embodied cognition can benefit gerontological research by identifying further factors that can explain the cause of age-related declines.

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Are Older Adults Less Embodied? A Review of Age Effects through the Lens of Embodied Cognition

A central theme in the study of animal navigation has been the extent to which such navigation requires the formation of an internal representation of space, the so-called " cognitive map." Although its properties remain disputed, it is now generally accepted that a map-like representation exists in the brain, and neurobiological studies, conducted in tandem with behavioral investigations, have done much to elucidate the neural substrate of the map as it operates in two dimensions. However, to date little is known about how the map encodes real-world, three-dimensional space. Using recent neurobiological and behavioral fi ndings, this issue is explored here. It is argued that the navigational problems in three dimensions are qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from those in two dimensions, and evidence suggests that, perhaps for this reason, horizontal and vertical space are processed separately in the vertebrate brain. The possible adaptive consequences of such an anisotropic. © 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. All rights reserved.

Navigating in a three-dimensional world

Experiments take place in a physical environment but also a social environment. Generalizability from experimental manipulations to more typical contexts may be limited by violations of ecological validity with respect to either the physical or the social environment. A replication and extension of a recent study (a blood glucose manipulation) was conducted to investigate the effects of experimental demand (a social artifact) on participant behaviors judging the geographical slant of a large-scale outdoor hill. Three different assessments of experimental demand indicate that even when the physical environment is naturalistic, and the goal of the main experimental manipulation was primarily concealed, artificial aspects of the social environment (such as an explicit requirement to wear a heavy backpack while estimating the slant of a hill) may still be primarily responsible for altered judgments of hill orientation.

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The social psychology of perception experiments: hills, backpacks, glucose, and the problem of generalizability.

Two experiments are reported concerning the perception of ground extent in order to discover whether prior reports of anisotropy between frontal extents and extents in depth were consistent across different measures (visual matching and pantomime walking) and test environments (outdoor environments and virtual environments). In Experiment 1 it was found that depth extents of up to 7 m are indeed perceptually compressed relative to frontal extents in an outdoor environment, and that perceptual matching provided more precise estimates than did pantomime walking. In Experiment 2, similar anisotropies were found using similar tasks in a similar (but virtual) environment. In both experiments pantomime walking measures seemed to additionally compress the range of responses. Experiment 3 supported the hypothesis that range compression in walking measures of perceived distance might be due to proactive interference (memory contamination). It is concluded that walking measures are calibrated for perceived egocentric distance, but that pantomime walking measures may suffer range compression. Depth extents along the ground are perceptually compressed relative to frontal ground extents in a manner consistent with the angular scale expansion hypothesis.

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Cassandra J. Strawser

Papers

The social psychology of perception experiments: hills, backpacks, glucose, and the problem of generalizability.

On the anisotropy of perceived ground extents and the interpretation of walked distance as a measure of perception.