Common sense and Berkeley's perception by suggestion

Abstract

Significant attention has been paid to Berkeley's account of perception; however, the interpretations of Berkeley's account of perception by suggestion are either incomplete or mistaken. In this paper I begin by examining a common interpretation of suggestion, the ‘Propositional Account’. I argue that the Propositional Account is inadequate and defend an alternative, non‐propositional, account. I then address George Pitcher's objection that Berkeley's view of sense perception forces him to adopt a ‘non‐conciliatory’ attitude towards common sense. I argue that Pitcher's charge is no longer plausible once we recognize that Berkeley endorses the non‐propositional sense of mediate perception. I close by urging that the non‐propositional interpretation of Berkeley's account of mediate perception affords a greater appreciation of Berkeley's attempt to bring a philosophical account of sense perception in line with some key principles of common sense. While Berkeley's account of perception and physical objects permits physical objects to be immediately perceived by some of the senses, they are, most often, mediately perceived. But for Berkeley this is not a challenge to common sense since common sense requires only that we perceive objects by our senses and that they are, more or less, as we perceive them. Mediate perception by suggestion is, for Berkeley, as genuine a form of perception as immediate perception, and both are compatible with Berkeley's understanding of the demands of common sense.     

Noncategorical perception of a voiced stop: A replication

Several studies have purported to show that perception to stop consonants is categorical, i.e., the stimuli are discriminated only slightly better than they are identified. However, all of these studies have employed successive rather than simultaneous discrimination tasks, confounding the effects of memory with those of immediate perception. The present experiment minimized the role of memory by requiring Ss to identify the same set of synthetic voiced stops twice, first using three response categories (b, d, g) and then using two (b, g). Results indicated that six out of seven Ss who appeared to be categorical perceivers on the basis of preliminary traditional measures later demonstrated noncategorical perception of /d/. A view of speech processing was suggested whereby consonants are perceived continuously but remembered categorically in terms of an articulatory code.     

Evidence for early extraction of emergent properties in visual perception: a replication

In conditions precluding focused attention, illusory conjunctions of triangles were more frequent when the emergent characteristic of closure was present in the display together with the component parts than when it was not. This replicates Treisman and Paterson's 1984 result, which is the strongest evidence available in favor of the notion of an early extraction of emergent properties.     

The influence of processing objectives on the perception of faces: An ERP study of race and gender perception

In two experiments, event-related potentials were used to examine the effects of attentional focus on the processing of race and gender cues from faces. When faces were still the focal stimuli, the processing of the faces at a level deeper than the social category by requiring a personality judgment resulted in early attention to race and gender, with race effects as early as 120 msec. This time course corresponds closely to those in past studies in which participants explicitly attended to target race and gender (Ito &Urland, 2003). However, a similar processing goal, coupled with a more complex stimulus array, delayed social category effects until 190 msec, in accord with the effects of complexity on visual attention. In addition, the N170 typically linked with structural face encoding was modulated by target race, but not by gender, when faces were perceived in a homogenous context consisting only of faces. This suggests that when basic-level distinctions between faces and nonfaces are irrelevant, the mechanism previously associated only with structural encoding can also be sensitive to features used to differentiate among faces.     

Effect of boredom proneness on time perception

As part of a larger study examining attribution differences in boredom, the effect of Boredom Proneness on perception of time passage was investigated in 110 undergraduates completing a tedious number-circling task. Highly boredom-prone individuals perceived time as passing more slowly during the task than low boredom-prone persons, but the two groups did not differ in their objective or chronometric time-passage estimates. The findings support the contention that depressed affect produces a subjective slowing of time but does not alter the perception of objective passage of chronometric time.     

study of taste perception

Taste stimulus identification was studied in order to more thoroughly examine human taste perception. Ten replicates of an array of 10 taste stimuli—NaCl, KCl, Na glutamate, quinine.HCl, citric acid, sucrose, aspartame, and NaCl-sucrose, acid-sucrose, and quinine-sucrose mixtures—were presented to normal subjects for identification from a list of corresponding stimulus names. Because perceptually similar substances are confused in identification tasks, the result was ataste confusion matrix. Consistency of identification for the 10 stimuli (T ₁₀) and for each stimulus pair (T ₂) was quantified with measures derived from information theory. Forty-two untrained subjects made an average of 57.4% correct identifications. An averageT ₁₀ of 2.25 of the maximum 3.32 bits and an averageT ₂ of 0.84 of a maximum 1.0 bit of information were transmitted. In a second experiment, 40 trained subjects per-formed better than 20 untrained subjects. The results suggested that the identification procedure may best be used to assess taste function following 1–2 training replicates. The patterns of taste confusion indicate that the 10 stimuli resemble one another to varying extents, yet each can be considered perceptually unique.     

The effects of attention on speech perception: an fMRI study

Focusing of attention to a specific speech source plays an important role in everyday speech perception. However, little is known of the neuronal substrates of focused attention in speech perception. Thus, the present study investigated the effects on neuronal activation of directed attention to auditory stimuli that differed in semantic content. Using an event-related fMRI protocol, single vowels, three-phoneme pseudowords and three- and four-phoneme real nouns and words were randomly presented to the subjects during four different instructional conditions. One condition was passive listening without any specific instructions of focusing of attention. The other conditions were attention focused on either the vowels, the pseudowords or the words. Thus, the acoustic stimulation was constant across conditions. The subjects were 13 healthy adults. Functional MRI was performed with a 1.5 T scanner, using an event-related design. During passive listening, there were significant activations bilaterally in the superior temporal gyrus. Instruction to attend to the pseudowords caused activation in middle temporal lobe areas, extending more anterior compared to the activations seen during passive listening. Instruction to attend to the vowel sounds caused an increase in activation in the superior/medial temporal lobe, with a leftward asymmetry. Instruction to attend to the words caused a leftward asymmetry, particularly in the middle and superior temporal gyri. It is concluded that attention plays a modulatory role in neuronal activation to speech sounds, producing specific activations to specific stimulus categories that may act to facilitate speech perception.     

Qualitative influences on the perception of movement: An experimental study

One of the most puzzling features of “hyperactivity” in children is the importance of activity itself. Generalized overactivity has not been found to be a valid diagnostic marker. Could some qualitative features of activity be important determinants of the perceived quantity of activity? The analogue study reported here derives from a social-psychological hypothesis that anything that makes a behavior more noticeable or distracting can create an illusion of increased movement. Subjects performed a simple cognitive task while watching short films of adult actors. Two variables were manipulated: (a) The sound level was either loud or quiet, and (b) instructions to subjects were varied so that the behaviors shown were perceived as either appropriate or inappropriate. Results strongly supported the hypothesis. Loudness and contextual inappropriateness made the films more distracting, produced higher ratings of the amount of movement observed, and led to more negative evaluations of the behaviors seen. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.     

Objective and simulated stimulation: an empirical study of the effect of indirect suggestion on motor behavior

In an experimental investigation it is demonstrated that motor behavior-in contrast to the opinion forwarded in the literature-is not only elicitable by means of direct persuasion, but also to a great extend by mere indirect suggestion, (feigning of stimuli). A differential investigation of these effects provided evidence that reactions to feigned stimuli are highly person specific and relatively homogenous concerning the respective instruments whereas objective stimuli lead to reactions relatively specific for the respective instrument applied. The findings are interpreted as an analog on to placebo-effects in the area of motor behavior. Their extend may be seen as an argument for a stronger concern with subjective reaction tendencies in this field.     

Effect of scaling method on perception of textiles

This study examined the effect of scaling methods on tactual ratings of fabrics. Four tactile attributes, namely, stiffness, thickness, roughness, and warmth, of 11 test fabrics with a wide variety of tactual qualities were evaluated by 75 college students enrolled in textile courses. The tactual ratings of all four attributes evaluated by touch and sight and touch were significantly correlated. The tactual evaluation made on a 7-point semantic differential scale on each test fabric was compared with tactual ranking by paired-comparison method. Significant correlations were found between two rankings of four attributes.     

Effect of expertise acquisition on strategic perception: The example of chess

The two experiments presented here study perceptual processes implemented by chess players in situations related to their domain of expertise. The aim was to determine how patterns are perceived as a function of their strategic value when players acquire expertise. In this study, conducted on novice and more experienced players, it is hypothesized that with acquisition of expertise players would quickly encode familiar patterns and then rapidly focus their attention on patterns with a higher immediate strategic value. In Experiment 1, participants had to carry out a change-detection task that used the “flicker paradigm”. The results showed that during the perception of standard chess positions, experienced players—but not novices—quickly focused their attention on the most strategic patterns. In Experiment 2, experienced players and novices carried out a recognition task after having encoded chess positions for 1 or 5 s. The results indicated early encoding of familiar patterns without immediate strategic value, followed by the encoding of more strategic patterns. Taken together, the results of these two experiments are consistent with the results by both de Groot and Gobet (1996) de Groot, A. D. and Gobet, F. 1996. Perception and memory in chess. Heuristics of the professional eye, Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum.  [Google Scholar] and McGregor and Howes (2002) McGregor, S. J. and Howes, A. 2002. The role of attack and defense semantics in skilled players' memory for chess positions. Memory & Cognition, 30: 707–717. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] about the strategic content of Chase and Simon's chunks (Chase & Simon, 1973b Chase, W. G. and Simon, H. A. 1973b. Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4: 55–81. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).