How meaning shapes seeing

Inattentional blindness refers to the failure to see an unexpected object that one may be looking at directly when one's attention is elsewhere. We studied whether a stimulus whose meaning is relevant to the attentional goals of the observer will capture attention and escape inattentional blindness. The results showed that an unexpected stimulus belonging to the attended semantic category but not sharing physical features with the attended stimuli was detected more often than a semantically unrelated stimulus. This effect was larger when the unexpected stimuli were words than when they were pictures. The results imply that the semantic relation between the observer's attentional set and the unexpected stimulus plays a crucial role in inattentional blindness: An unexpected stimulus semantically related to the observer's current interests is likely to be seen, whereas unrelated unexpected stimuli are unseen. Attentional selection may thus be driven by purely semantic features: Meaning may determine whether or not one sees a stimulus.     

Visual sensing without seeing

Abstract— It has often been assumed that when we use vision to become aware of an object or event in our surroundings, this must be accompanied by a corresponding visual experience (i.e., seeing). The studies reported here show that this assumption is incorrect. When observers view a sequence of displays alternating between an image of a scene and the same image changed in some way, they often feel (or sense) the change even though they have no visual experience of it. The subjective difference between sensing and seeing is mirrored in several behavioral differences, suggesting that these are two distinct modes of conscious visual perception.     

Mechanisms for seeing transparency-from-motion and orientation-from-motion

Structure-from-motion (SFM) perception is hypothesised to be mediated by units that sense the near-far relationships in transparency-from-motion (TFM) and orientation-from-motion (OFM). The frequency of subjective reversals during observation of ambiguous SFM displays is considerably decreased when either the direction of rotation or the surface orientation is oscillated during the inspection. Such manipulations impede adaptation of units selectively sensitive to TFM and OFM. The results show that both OFM and TFM units are direction-selective, and that the reversal rate is unaffected by reducing TFM to zero; and support the view that depth order, when both TFM and OFM are present, is estimated by common neural units.     

Inattentional blindness: looking without seeing

Surprising as it may seem, research shows that we rarely see what we are looking at unless our attention is directed to it. This phenomenon can have serious life-and-death consequences. Although the inextricable link between perceiving and attending was noted long ago by Aristotle, this phenomenon, now called inattentional blindness (IB), only recently has been named and carefully studied. Among the many questions that have been raised about IB are questions about the fate of the clearly visible, yet unseen stimuli, whether any stimuli reliably capture attention, and, if so, what they have in common. Finally, is IB an instance of rapid forgetting, or is it a failure to perceive?     

A puzzle about seeing for representationalism

When characterizing the content of a subject’s perceptual experience, does their seeing an object entail that their visual experience represents it as being a certain way? If it does, are they thereby in a position to have perceptually-based thoughts about it? On one hand, representationalists are under pressure to answer these questions in the affirmative. On the other hand, it seems they cannot. This paper presents a puzzle to illustrate this tension within orthodox representationalism. We identify several interesting morals which may be drawn in response, each of which teaches us something interesting and important about perceptual experience and its interface with cognition and related phenomena.

     

Perceptual experience and seeing that p

I open my eyes and see that the lemon before me is yellow. States like this—states of seeing that $p$ —appear to be visual perceptual states, in some sense. They also appear to be propositional attitudes (and so states with propositional representational contents). It might seem, then, like a view of perceptual experience on which experiences have propositional representational contents—a Propositional View—has to be the correct sort of view for states of seeing that $p$ . And thus we can’t sustain fully general non-Propositional but Representational, or Relational Views of experience. But despite what we might initially be inclined to think when reflecting upon the apparent features of states of seeing that $p$ , a non-propositional view of seeing that $p$ is, I argue, perfectly intelligible.     

Contextualism and a puzzle about seeing

Contextualist solutions to skeptical puzzles have recently been subjected to various criticisms. In this paper, I will defend contextualism against an objection pressed by Jason Stanley. In the course of doing so, I argue that either semantic context-sensitivity is very widespread in natural language, or else Stanley's ``binding' test for the presence of hidden variables in logical form is not a good test.     

Sensing without seeing in comparative visual search

Rensink [Rensink, R. A. (2004). Visual sensing without seeing. Psychological Science, 15(1), 27-32] has presented evidence suggesting visual changes may be sensed without an accompanying visual experience. Here, we report two experiments in which we monitored observers' eye-movements whilst they searched for a difference between two simultaneously presented images and pressed separate response keys when a difference was seen or sensed. We first assessed whether sensing performance was random by collecting ratings of confidence in the validity of sensing and assessing gaze location during sensing. Sensing was not random: fixation position and confidence ratings were different when a difference was present compared to catch trials. Furthermore, the uniformity of objects in the images and the type of difference appear to affect seeing and sensing differently, suggesting that these processes are dissociated. The possibility is discussed of a sensing mechanism that increases vigilance toward unconsciously registered differences, particularly changes to scene layout.     

Recalling what was where when seeing nothing there

So-called “looks-at-nothing” have previously been used to show that recalling what also elicits the recall of where this was. Here, we present evidence from an eye-tracking study which shows that disrupting looks to “there” does not disrupt recalling what was there, nor do (anticipatory) looks to “there” facilitate recalling what was there. Therefore, our results suggest that recalling where does not recall what.     

The vicissitudes of seeing: Iconoclasm and idolatry

Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm. Trans. by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000, viii+423 pp., 32 b/w illustrations, $40.00 ISBN 0 226 04413 0.

Albert Boime, The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalistic Era. Cambridge Studies in American Visual Culture. Cambridge, University of Cambridge Press, 1998, xvii+427 pp., 86 b/w illustrations, $69.50 ISBN 0 521 57067 0.

Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997, xiii+ 331 pp., 50 b/w illustrations, $55.00 (hardback) ISBN 0 691 02622 X, $19.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 691 00520 6.

Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997, 416 pp., 151 b/w illustrations, $45.00 ISBN 0 300 07170 1.

Gerald R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, xvii+ 168 pp., $54.95 ISBN 0 521 65165 4.

Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, xiii+337 pp., 9 b/w illustrations, $69.50 ISBN 0 691 02979 2.     

Brain potentials related to seeing one''s own name

Subjects were assigned an assumed name and then shown a series of statements of the form, "My name / is / X", where X was the assumed name, their own first name, or one of a set of other false names. Their task was to respond positively to the "assumed" name and reject as false all other names, including their own. An N380 feature of the averaged task-related brain potentials, considered to be inversely related to the degree of contextual priming, was greatly enhanced for the false names compared to the assumed name. The N380 to one's own name was more similar to that of the false than the assumed name, indicating that the sentence context's priming of various names was under the subjects' attentional control, and that the late negativity could be modulated by this attention. In contrast, a large P510 feature distinguished one's own name from the false name, and this difference was unaffected by practice. Even in cases, then, where the context allows anticipation of one verbal event (here, the assumed name), a highly overlearned and salient stimulus such as one's own name continues to produce a distinctive neural response.     

Sound changes that lead to seeing longer-lasting shapes

To survive, people must construct an accurate representation of the world around them. There is a body of research on visual scene analysis, and a largely separate literature on auditory scene analysis. The current study follows up research from the smaller literature on audiovisual scene analysis. Prior work demonstrated that when there is an abrupt size change to a moving object, observers tend to see two objects rather than one—the abrupt visual change enhances visible persistence of the briefly presented different-sized object. Moreover, if a sequence of tones accompanies the moving object, visible persistence is enhanced if the tone frequency suddenly changes at the same time that the object’s size changes. Here, we show that although a sound change must occur at roughly the same time as a visual change to enhance visible persistence, there is a fairly wide time frame during which the sound change can occur. In addition, the impact of a sound change on visible persistence is not simply matter of the physical pattern: The same pattern of sound can enhance visible persistence or not, depending on how the pattern is itself perceived. Specifically, a change in a tone’s frequency can enhance visible persistence when it accompanies a visual size change, but the same frequency change will not do so if the shift is embedded in a larger pattern that makes the change merely a continuation of alternating frequencies. The current study supports a scene analysis process that is both multimodal and actively constructive.