The cognitive penetrability of perception: A blocked debate and a tentative solution

Despite the extensive body of psychological findings suggesting that cognition influences perception, the debate between defenders and detractors of the cognitive penetrability of perception persists. While detractors demand more strictness in psychological experiments, proponents consider that empirical studies show that cognitive penetrability occurs. These considerations have led some theorists to propose that the debate has reached a dead end. The issue about where perception ends and cognition begins is, I argue, one of the reasons why the debate is cornered. Another reason is the inability of psychological studies to present uncontroversial interpretations of the results obtained. To dive into other kinds of empirical sources is, therefore, required to clarify the debate. In this paper, I explain where the debate is blocked, and suggest that neuroscientific evidence together with the predictive coding account, might decant the discussion on the side of the penetrability thesis.     

Development of predictive responses in theory of mind brain regions

When we watch movies, we consider the characters’ mental states in order to understand and predict the narrative. Recent work in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) uses movie‐viewing paradigms to measure functional responses in brain regions recruited for such mental state reasoning (the theory of mind [“ToM”] network). Here, two groups of young children (n = 30 3–4 years old, n = 26 6–7 years old) viewed a short animated movie twice while undergoing fMRI. As children get older, ToM brain regions were recruited earlier in time during the second presentation of the movie. This “narrative anticipation” effect is specific: there was no such effect in a control network of brain regions that responds just as robustly to the movie (the “Pain Matrix”). These results complement prior studies in adults that suggest that ToM brain regions play a role not just in inferring, but in actively predicting, other people's thoughts and feelings, and provide novel evidence that as children get older, their ToM brain regions increasingly make such predictions.     

Meta-analytic findings reveal lower means but higher variances in visuospatial ability in dyslexia

Conflicting empirical and theoretical accounts suggest that dyslexia is associated with either average, enhanced, or impoverished high-level visuospatial processing relative to controls. Such heterogeneous results could be due to the presence of wider variability in dyslexic samples, which is unlikely to be identified at the single study level, due to lack of power. To address this, this study reports a meta-analysis of means and variances in high-level visuospatial ability in 909 non-dyslexic and 956 dyslexic individuals. The findings suggest that dyslexia is associated not only with a lower mean performance on visuospatial tasks but also with greater variability in performance. Through novel meta-analytic techniques, we demonstrate a negative effect size for mean differences (−.457), but a positive effect size for SD differences (+.118; SD ratio = 1.107). In doing so, this is the first study to demonstrate impoverished visuospatial processing of the majority of individuals with dyslexia in addition to greater variance in performance in this group. The findings advocate for further consideration of both the presence of, and reasons for, increased variance in perception, attention, and memory across neurodevelopmental disorders.     

Protein analysis meets visual word recognition: a case for string kernels in the brain

It has been recently argued that some machine learning techniques known as Kernel methods could be relevant for capturing cognitive and neural mechanisms ( Jäkel, Schölkopf, & Wichmann, 2009 ). We point out that ‘‘String kernels,’’ initially designed for protein function prediction and spam detection, are virtually identical to one contending proposal for how the brain encodes orthographic information during reading. We suggest some reasons for this connection and we derive new ideas for visual word recognition that are successfully put to the test. We argue that the versatility and performance of String kernels makes a compelling case for their implementation in the brain.     

Reply to Commentaries

In our response, we address four themes arising from the commentaries. First, we discuss the distinction between cognition and metacognition and show how to draw it within our framework. Next, we explain how metacognition differs from social cognition. The underlying mechanisms of metacognitive development are then elucidated in terms of interaction patterns. Finally, we consider measures of metacognition and suitable methods for investigating it. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

数字-空间联结SNARC效应的编码：视觉空间和言语空间

采用Gevers等的实验范式,以判断数字大小并选择不同言语符号方向信息左右为任务。材料为阿拉伯数字（1、2、8、9）和汉字、英文单词符号（“左”、“右”、“left”、“m#t”）。考察在不同语言符号方向信息下数字-空间联结SANBC效应的编码方式,结果发现：（1）在汉字和英文符号信息下,被试在数字大小比较任务中都表现出SNARC效应;（2）在汉字符号方向信息下。SNARC效应的编码方式主要存在视觉空间和言语空间编码,且以言语空间编码为主;（3）在英文符号方向信息下。SNARC效应的鳊码方式主要是视觉空间编码。     

Configural representations in spatial working memory

Two studies investigate the nature of representations in spatial working memory, directly addressing the question of whether people represent the configuration information above and beyond independent positional information when representing multiple sequentially presented locations. In Experiment 1, participants performed a location memory task in which they recalled the location of objects that were presented sequentially on a screen. Comparison of participants' data with simulated data modelled to represent independent positional representation of spatial locations revealed that participants represented the configural properties of shorter sequences (3 and 4 locations) but not of longer ones (5 and 7 locations). Experiment 2 employed a sequential recognition task in which participants were asked to judge whether two consequently presented spatial sequences were identical. These experiments confirmed sensitivity to configural properties of spatial sequences.     

Action–effect congruence during observational learning leads to faster action sequence learning

Common coding theory suggests that any action (pressing a piano key) is intimately linked with its resultant sensory effect (an auditory musical tone). We conducted two experiments to explore the effect of varying auditory action–effect patterns during complex action learning. In Experiment 1, participants were assigned to 1 of 4 groups, watched a silent video of a hand playing a sequence on a piano keyboard with no auditory action effect (observation) and were asked to practise and perform the sequence on an identical keyboard with varying action effects (reproduction). During reproduction, Group 1 heard no auditory tones (identical to observed video), Group 2 heard typical scale-ascending piano tones with each key press, Group 3 heard fixed but out-of-sequence piano tones with each key press, and Group 4 heard random piano tones with each key press. In Experiment two, new participants were assigned to 1 of 2 groups and watched an identical video; however, the video in this experiment contained typical, scale-ascending piano sounds. During reproduction, Group 1 heard no auditory tones while Group 2 heard typical, scale-ascending piano tones with each key press (identical to observed video). Our results showed that participants whose action–effect patterns during reproduction matched those in the observed video learned the action sequence faster than participants whose action–effect patterns during reproduction differed from those in the observed video. Additionally, our results suggest that adding an effect during reproduction (when one is absent during observation) is somewhat more detrimental to action sequence learning than removing an effect during reproduction (when one is present during observation).     

Transposed-letter priming effect in Hebrew in the same–different task

We investigated the interaction between morphological structure and transposed-letter priming using the same–different task with Hebrew, a Semitic language in which morphology has been shown to play a key role in visual word recognition. In contrast to the results observed with lexical decision (e.g., Velan & Frost, 2009, 2011), a transposed-letter priming effect was observed irrespective of the morphological structure of the words. We take these results to suggest that morphological decomposition occurs only in the service of lexical access. We discuss further a unique feature of written Arabic, another Semitic language, to explain the apparent conflict between our findings and those reported by Perea, Abu Mallouh, García-Orza, and Carreiras (2010).     

时距知觉的扭曲:新异刺激效应

时距知觉会受到刺激新异性的影响,新异刺激的呈现时间往往被认为长于等时距重复出现的标准刺激的呈现时间.已有研究在解释这种主观的时距扩张现象时主要涉及三种假设:注意假设、唤醒假设和神经编码效能假设.研究中的变量混淆问题、跨通道效应和时间因素是今后研究中值得思考的几个问题.对于新异刺激效应产生的心理和神经机制,研究者们还存在着较大分歧.进一步探讨其心理和神经机制对理解时距知觉具有重要意义.