Journal ArticleDOI
Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for "top-down" effects.
Chaz Firestone,Brian J. Scholl +1 more
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This work suggests that none of these hundreds of studies – either individually or collectively – provides compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or “cognitive penetrability,” and suggests that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls.Abstract:
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: enread more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations
Ranjay Krishna,Yuke Zhu,Oliver Groth,Justin Johnson,Kenji Hata,Joshua Kravitz,Stephanie Chen,Yannis Kalantidis,Li-Jia Li,David A. Shamma,Michael S. Bernstein,Li Fei-Fei +11 more
TL;DR: The Visual Genome dataset as mentioned in this paper contains over 108k images where each image has an average of $35$35 objects, $26$26 attributes, and $21$21 pairwise relationships between objects.
Posted Content
Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations
Ranjay Krishna,Yuke Zhu,Oliver Groth,Justin Johnson,Kenji Hata,Joshua Kravitz,Stephanie Chen,Yannis Kalantidis,Li-Jia Li,David A. Shamma,Michael S. Bernstein,Fei-Fei Li +11 more
TL;DR: The Visual Genome dataset is presented, which contains over 108K images where each image has an average of $$35$$35 objects, $$26$$26 attributes, and $$21$$21 pairwise relationships between objects, and represents the densest and largest dataset of image descriptions, objects, attributes, relationships, and question answer pairs.
Book
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
TL;DR: The authors of "Make It Stick" as mentioned in this paper argue that "learning the hard way" implies wasted time and effort, and that good teaching should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Predictive Coding Account of Psychosis
Philipp Sterzer,Rick A. Adams,Paul C. Fletcher,Chris D. Frith,Stephen M. Lawrie,Lars Muckli,Predrag Petrovic,Peter J. Uhlhaas,Martin Voss,Philip R. Corlett +9 more
TL;DR: The current evidence for aberrant predictive coding is reviewed and challenges for this canonical predictive coding account of psychosis are discussed, portending a framework for psychosis more equipped to deal with its many manifestations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Hallucinations and Strong Priors
Philip R. Corlett,Guillermo Horga,Paul C. Fletcher,Paul C. Fletcher,Ben Alderson-Day,Katharina Schmack,Albert R. Powers +6 more
TL;DR: This work underlines the continuum from normal to aberrant perception, encouraging a more empathic approach to clinical hallucinations, and highlights the role of prior beliefs as a critical elicitor of hallucinations.
References
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Book
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
TL;DR: The relationship between Stimulation and Stimulus Information for visual perception is discussed in detail in this article, where the authors also present experimental evidence for direct perception of motion in the world and movement of the self.
Journal ArticleDOI
A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing
TL;DR: The present paper shows how the extended theory can account for results of several production experiments by Loftus, Juola and Atkinson's multiple-category experiment, Conrad's sentence-verification experiments, and several categorization experiments on the effect of semantic relatedness and typicality by Holyoak and Glass, Rips, Shoben, and Smith, and Rosch.
Journal ArticleDOI
Predictive coding in the visual cortex: a functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects.
Rajesh P. N. Rao,Dana H. Ballard +1 more
TL;DR: Results suggest that rather than being exclusively feedforward phenomena, nonclassical surround effects in the visual cortex may also result from cortico-cortical feedback as a consequence of the visual system using an efficient hierarchical strategy for encoding natural images.
Journal ArticleDOI
Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science
TL;DR: This target article critically examines this "hierarchical prediction machine" approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action.
Journal ArticleDOI
Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations.
TL;DR: The results of both experiments support a retrieval model involving a dependence between separate successive decisions about whether each of the two strings is a word.