scholarly journals “Impossible” Somatosensation and the (Ir)rationality of Perception

Open Mind ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Isabel Won ◽  
Steven Gross ◽  
Chaz Firestone
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Single Object ◽  
Rational Models ◽  
Magic Trick ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
The World ◽  
Weight Illusion ◽  
Impossible Figures ◽  
Special Case

Abstract Impossible figures represent the world in ways it cannot be. From the work of M. C. Escher to any popular perception textbook, such experiences show how some principles of mental processing can be so entrenched and inflexible as to produce absurd and even incoherent outcomes that could not occur in reality. Surprisingly, however, such impossible experiences are mostly limited to visual perception; are there “impossible figures” for other sensory modalities? Here, we import a known magic trick into the laboratory to report and investigate an impossible somatosensory experience—one that can be physically felt. We show that, even under full-cue conditions with objects that can be freely inspected, subjects can be made to experience a single object alone as feeling heavier than a group of objects that includes the single object as a member—an impossible and phenomenologically striking experience of weight. Moreover, we suggest that this phenomenon—a special case of the size-weight illusion—reflects a kind of “anti-Bayesian” perceptual updating that amplifies a challenge to rational models of perception and cognition. Impossibility can not only be seen, but also felt—and in ways that matter for accounts of (ir)rational mental processing.

scholarly journals Impossible Somatosensation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Won ◽  
Steven Gross ◽  
Chaz Firestone
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Single Object ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
The World ◽  
Impossible Figures

Impossible figures represent the world in ways it cannot be. From the work of M.C. Escher to any popular perception textbook, such experiences show how some principles of mental processing can be so entrenched and inflexible as to produce absurd and even incoherent outcomes that the perceiver knows cannot occur in reality. Surprisingly, however, such experiences have been conspicuously limited to visual perception; are there impossible experiences in other sensory modalities? Here, we modify a known conjurer’s trick to report the first impossible somatosensory experience — one that can be physically felt. We show that, even in full-cue conditions with objects that can be freely inspected, subjects can be made to experience a single object alone as feeling heavier than a group of objects that includes the single object as a member — an impossible and phenomenologically striking experience of weight. Impossibility can not only be seen, but also felt.

scholarly journals The weirdest people in the world?

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 61-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Henrich ◽  
Steven J. Heine ◽  
Ara Norenzayan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Spatial Reasoning ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Behavioral Sciences ◽  
The World ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Behavioral Phenomenon

AbstractBehavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

scholarly journals Financeirização e novos espaços de acumulação: um estudo das transformações da Hering após 1960

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Follmann Jurgenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Textile Industry ◽  
World Crisis ◽  
The World ◽  
Special Case

RESUMO: Este artigo discute as transformações da empresa Hering, desde sua origem até a primeira década dos anos 2000. Dentro deste período, ressalta-se o pós-1960, quando a crise no capitalismo mundial se evidencia, embora suas repercussões no Brasil sejam sentidas mais tardiamente, nos anos 1980, com grande impacto no setor têxtil nacional especialmente nos anos 1990. É neste período que há a abertura econômica, em meio a uma política econômica neoliberal. A partir de um estudo de caso, este artigo, discutirá, portanto, importantes mudanças do capitalismo mundial em anos mais recentes, no que diz respeito à financeirização e a busca de novos espaços de acumulação por uma grande corporação como a Hering. ABSTRACT: This article discusses the transformations of Hering, since its origins until the first decade of 2000’s. During this period, it’s very important to analyze the post-1960, when a world crisis breaks out, even though its effects in Brazil only had occurred during the 1980’s, with enormous impact in the textile industry in the 1990’s. During this decade, there was the opening of the Brazilian economy, conducted by a neoliberal agenda. Studying a special case, this article debates the most important changes in the world capitalism in recent years particularly related to financialization and the searching of new spaces for accumulation by a great corporation like Hering.

scholarly journals Trends in the evolution of ecology: “Spain is different”

Web Ecology ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Cordero Rivera
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Ecology ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Temporal Development ◽  
Physical Systems ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
The World ◽  
University Department ◽  
Evolutionary Concepts ◽  
Special Case

Abstract. During the last fifty years ecology has matured as a scientific discipline. In this paper I analyse the temporal development of the paradigm based on physical systems (the ecosystem paradigm), and the evolutionary ecology paradigm. I first analyse the contents of 61 textbooks to calculate the relative importance of ecosystem and evolutionary ecology in the training of new generations of ecologists. Results indicate that the evolutionary approach is becoming more important since 1980, and now most textbooks dedicate 10–20% of their pages to evolutionary concepts. In a second analysis I searched the names of ecology departments in universities around the world, and found out conspicuous differences between USA, where 43% of addresses associate ecology and evolution or behaviour on the same department, and Europe, where only 10% of ecology departments also include a reference to evolution or behaviour in their name. In both analyses Spain seems to follow only the ecosystem paradigm, because Spanish textbooks dedicate almost no pages to evolutionary concepts, and there is not a single university department that includes ecology and evolution. A further bibliometric study confirmed that Spanish ecologists prefer to publish their research in general ecology journals, and are under-represented in evolutionary ecology journals. I discuss the importance of historical factors on the development of paradigms of ecology, and the special case of Spain, likely due to the influence of pioneers working in oceanography, limnology and geography.

scholarly journals The rhythmic nature of visual perception

2018 ◽  
Vol 119 (4) ◽  
pp. 1251-1253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph F. Helfrich
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Oculomotor System ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Discrete Sampling ◽  
The Neural Network ◽  
The World ◽  
Oscillatory Brain Activity

Our continuous perception of the world could be the result of discrete sampling, where individual snapshots are seamlessly fused into a coherent stream. It has been argued that endogenous oscillatory brain activity could provide the functional substrate of cortical rhythmic sampling. A new study demonstrates that cortical rhythmic sampling is tightly linked to the oculomotor system, thus providing a novel perspective on the neural network underlying top-down guided visual perception.

scholarly journals Multistability in perception: binding sensory modalities, an overview

2012 ◽  
Vol 367 (1591) ◽  
pp. 896-905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Schwartz ◽  
Nicolas Grimault ◽  
Jean-Michel Hupé ◽  
Brian C. J. Moore ◽  
Daniel Pressnitzer
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Organization ◽  
Stimulus Information ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Physical Stimulus ◽  
Ambiguous Figures ◽  
Multistable Perception ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Perceptual Systems

This special issue presents research concerning multistable perception in different sensory modalities. Multistability occurs when a single physical stimulus produces alternations between different subjective percepts. Multistability was first described for vision, where it occurs, for example, when different stimuli are presented to the two eyes or for certain ambiguous figures. It has since been described for other sensory modalities, including audition, touch and olfaction. The key features of multistability are: (i) stimuli have more than one plausible perceptual organization; (ii) these organizations are not compatible with each other. We argue here that most if not all cases of multistability are based on competition in selecting and binding stimulus information. Binding refers to the process whereby the different attributes of objects in the environment, as represented in the sensory array, are bound together within our perceptual systems, to provide a coherent interpretation of the world around us. We argue that multistability can be used as a method for studying binding processes within and across sensory modalities. We emphasize this theme while presenting an outline of the papers in this issue. We end with some thoughts about open directions and avenues for further research.

The Time Course of Perceptual Grouping in Natural Scenes

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (12) ◽  
pp. 1482-1489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilia Korjoukov ◽  
Danique Jeurissen ◽  
Niels A. Kloosterman ◽  
Josine E. Verhoeven ◽  
H. Steven Scholte ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Perceptual Grouping ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Object Classification ◽  
Natural Scenes ◽  
Single Object ◽  
Object A ◽  
Object Parsing ◽  
Different Parts

Visual perception starts with localized filters that subdivide the image into fragments that undergo separate analyses. The visual system has to reconstruct objects by grouping image fragments that belong to the same object. A widely held view is that perceptual grouping occurs in parallel across the visual scene and without attention. To test this idea, we measured the speed of grouping in pictures of animals and vehicles. In a classification task, these pictures were categorized efficiently. In an image-parsing task, participants reported whether two cues fell on the same or different objects, and we measured reaction times. Despite the participants’ fast object classification, perceptual grouping required more time if the distance between cues was larger, and we observed an additional delay when the cues fell on different parts of a single object. Parsing was also slower for inverted than for upright objects. These results imply that perception starts with rapid object classification and that rapid classification is followed by a serial perceptual grouping phase, which is more efficient for objects in a familiar orientation than for objects in an unfamiliar orientation.

Non-Visual Perception

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-81
Author(s):  
Casey O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Perceptual Consciousness ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Sensory Modalities

This chapter addresses perceptual consciousness beyond vision. An impressive reach of human perceptual consciousness is non-visual. From this perspective, it is odd that philosophers have so persistently focused on visual forms at the expense of others. This oversight has potential costs. Nothing guarantees that claims about perceptual consciousness or its phenomenology founded on vision alone generalize to non-visual ways of perceiving. Moreover, critical features may be missed by dwelling on vision. If we are after a general and comprehensive account of perceptual consciousness and its phenomenology, it is poor methodology to focus exclusively on vision. This chapter aims to provide the background that is relevant to understanding and appreciating the significance of varieties of consciousness associated with other sensory modalities, such as hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

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