Perception, as you make it

摘要: The main question F&S pose is whether “what and how we see is functionally independent from what and how we think, know, desire, act, etc.” We synthesize a collection of concerns from an interdisciplinary set of co-authors regarding F&S’s assumptions and appeals to intuition, resulting in their treatment of visual perception as context-free.Main Text: No perceptual task takes place in a contextual vacuum. How do we know that an effect is one of perception qua perception that does not involve other cognitive contributions? Experimental instructions alone involve various cognitive factors that guide task performance (Roepstorff & Frith, 2004). Even a request to detect simple stimulus features requires participants to understand the instructions (“language, memory”), keep track of them (“working memory”), become sensitive to them (“attention”), and pick up the necessary information to become appropriately sensitive (“perception”). These processes work in a dynamic parallelism that is required when one participates in any experiment. Any experiment with enough cognitive content to test top-down effects would seem to