scholarly journals Why the whole is more than the sum of its parts: Salience-driven overestimation in aggregated tactile sensations

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (10) ◽  
pp. 2509-2526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Cataldo ◽  
Elisa Raffaella Ferrè ◽  
Giuseppe di Pellegrino ◽  
Patrick Haggard
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Individual Component ◽  
Sensory System ◽  
Single Stimulus ◽  
Perceptual Bias ◽  
Electrical Shocks ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Tactile Sensations ◽  
Simple Summation ◽  
Component Stimulus

Experimental psychology often studies perception analytically, reducing its focus to minimal sensory units, such as thresholds or just noticeable differences in a single stimulus. Here, in contrast, we examine a synthetic aspect: how multiple inputs to a sensory system are aggregated into an overall percept. Participants in three experiments judged the total stimulus intensity for simultaneous electrical shocks to two digits. We tested whether the integration of component somatosensory stimuli into a total percept occurs automatically, or rather depends on the ability to consciously perceive discrepancy among components (Experiment 1), whether the discrepancy among these components influences sensitivity or/and perceptual bias in judging totals (Experiment 2), and whether the salience of each individual component stimulus affects perception of total intensity (Experiment 3). Perceptual aggregation of two simultaneous component events occurred both when participants could perceptually discriminate the two intensities, and also when they could not. Further, the actual discrepancy between the stimuli modulated both participants’ sensitivity and perceptual bias: increasing discrepancies produced a systematic and progressive overestimation of total intensity. The degree of this bias depended primarily on the salience of the stronger stimulus in the pair. Overall, our results suggest that important nonlinear mechanisms contribute to sensory aggregation. The mind aggregates component inputs into a coherent and synthetic perceptual experience in a salience-weighted fashion that is not based on simple summation of inputs.

Douglas Gordon and the Gallery of the Mind

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mind's Eye ◽  
Made In

Made in collaboration with Rufus Wainwright after the loss of his mother, Douglas Gordon’s Phantom (2011) engages gallery-goers in an embodied perceptual experience of the darkness of grief, which is felt as well as seen. And yet the titular phantom points to what ghosts embodied vision, making space for images of the mind’s eye. Lost love, mourned but also conjured back through memory, dream, or imagination, extends beyond the personal to include a bygone era of classical film. Phantom draws from and returns us to cinema, expanding the experience of the moving image through its insistence upon the importance of both what is present or visible in the gallery space and what exists in the liminal state of mental vision.

Must Conceptually Informed Perceptual Experience Involve Non-Conceptual Content?

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Sedivy
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Proper Part ◽  
Nonconceptual Content ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Empirical Thought ◽  
Mental Contents

The idea of nonconceptual contents proposes that there are mental contents at the level of the experiencing person that are individuated independently of ‘anything to do with the mind.’ Such contents are posited to meet a variety of theoretical and explanatory needs concerning concepts and conceptual mental contents which are individuated in terms having to do with the mind. So to examine the idea of nonconceptual content we need to examine whether we really need to posit such content and whether there is a coherent, viable way of doing so. I will examine the idea of nonconceptual contents by considering Christopher Peacocke's attempt, in his Study of Concepts, to posit such contents.Three principal kinds of considerations motivate positing non-conceptual content: epistemological, phenomenological, and explanatory-psychological. A theory of knowledge might posit nonconceptual content in order to show that our experience contains the justificatory base for empirical thought as its own proper part. Non-conceptual content might also be posited in order to account for the finely detailed or determinate phenomenological character of perceptual experience.

scholarly journals Hello From the Other Side: Robust Contralateral Interference in Tactile Detection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flor Kusnir ◽  
Slav Pesin ◽  
Ayelet N. Landau
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
List Type ◽  
Body Site ◽  
Somatosensory Processing ◽  
Early Integration ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Tactile Detection ◽  
Tactile Sensations ◽  
Sense Of Touch ◽  
Simple Summation

AbstractOur sense of touch is unique in that our tactile receptors are spread across our body surface and constantly receive different inputs at the same time. These inputs vary in relevance according to our current goals, but there is little research on how simultaneous stimulation to different body sites affects the perception of touch. In this series of studies, we characterised how irrelevant tactile sensations across the body-midline affect tactile detection in a constantly-attended body site. Participants had to detect a target on their dominant index finger, while receiving irrelevant stimulation to another body site (homologous and non-homologous fingers, and the contralateral ankle). We document robust interference effects on all measured body-sites. Its impact on detection-performance was unaffected by body posture, exacerbated by the intensity of the irrelevant stimulation, and ameliorated by embedding a target-like signal in the irrelevant stimulation. In addition, we generalise our findings beyond the target stimulus (i.e., a vibration intensity decrement) and report similar effects when employing a target-increment. In light of our findings, we propose that tactile inputs may be pooled together early in the hierarchy of somatosensory processing, resulting in an integrated percept. The rules for integration across body sides are likely not described by a simple summation, but rather may be governed by more complex interactions between fingers and according to the corresponding perceived, as well as actual, intensities of the stimulation.HighlightsIrrelevant stimulation to a contralateral body site hinders tactile detection.We show robust and early integration of sensory inputs from across body sides.The amount of interference varies by the signal-to-noise in the irrelevant stimulation.Interference may result from cortical integration of bilateral tactile sensations.

scholarly journals Are basic actors brainbound agents? Narrowing down solutions to the problem of probabilistic content for predictive perceivers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Britten-Neish
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Conditional Probability Density ◽  
Single Action ◽  
Density Distributions ◽  
Consciousness Studies ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
Probability Density Distributions ◽  
The Mind

AbstractClark (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25(3–4), 71–87, 2018) worries that predictive processing (PP) accounts of perception introduce a puzzling disconnect between the content of personal-level perceptual states and their underlying subpersonal representations. According to PP, in perception, the brain encodes information about the environment in conditional probability density distributions over causes of sensory input. But it seems perceptual experience only presents us with one way the world is at a time. If perception is at bottom probabilistic, shouldn’t this aspect of subpersonally represented content show up in consciousness? To address this worry, Clark argues that representations underlying personal-level content are constrained by the need to provide a single action-guiding take on the environment. However, this proposal rests a conception of the nature of agency, famously articulated by Davidson (1980a, b), that is inconsistent with a view of the mind as embodied-extended. Since Clark and other enactivist PP theorists present the extended mind as an important consequence of the predictive framework, the proposal is in tension with his complete view. I claim that this inconsistency could be resolved either by retaining the Davidsonian view of action and abandoning the extended-embodied approach, or by adopting a more processual, world-involving account of agency and perceptual experience than Clark currently endorses. To solve the puzzle he raises, Clark must become a radical enactivist or a consistent internalist.

scholarly journals Beauty-related perceptual bias: Who captures the mind of the beholder?

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. e01232
Author(s):  
Yan Zhang ◽  
Yu Xiang ◽  
Ying Guo ◽  
Lili Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Bias ◽  
The Mind

The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Papineau
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Qualitative Theory ◽  
School Students ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Essential Connection ◽  
The Mind

What are the materials of conscious perceptual experience? What is going on when we are consciously aware of a visual scene, or hear sounds, or otherwise enjoy sensory experience? In The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience David Papineau exposes the flaws in contemporary answers to this central philosophical question and defends a new alternative. Contemporary theories of perceptual experience all hold that conscious experiences reach out into the world beyond the mind. According to naïve realism, experiences literally incorporate perceived facts, while representationalism holds that experiences contain ordinary properties of the kind possessed by physical objects. These ideas might seem attractive at first sight, but Papineau shows that they do not stand up to examination. Instead Papineau argues for a purely qualitative account of sensory experience. Conscious sensory experiences are intrinsic states of people with no essential connection to external circumstances or represented properties. This might run counter to initial intuition, but Papineau shows that it is the only view that fits the facts. He develops this qualitative theory in detail, showing how it can accommodate the rich structure of sensory experience. Papineau’s qualitative account has respectable antecedents in the history of philosophy, and is also probably the view adopted by most non-specialists, be they reflective high school students, practising neuroscientists, or philosophers working outside the philosophy of perception. By placing the qualitative theory on a firm footing, Papineau shows all those curious about experience that they need not be restricted to the options on the contemporary philosophical menu.

Expérimenter la pensée en schémas-images. Des adolescents s’interrogent « d’où viennent les pensées ? »

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (2 supplement) ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Anda Fournel ◽  
Jean-Pascal Simon
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Philosophy For Children ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Image Schemas ◽  
Inquiry Process ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

"Experimenting Thinking in Image Schemas. Teenagers are Wondering “Where Do Thoughts Come From?” An intellectual view of philosophy as an activity focusing on understanding abstract concepts and their relationships deprives philosophical exercise of the participation of the body and senses. If we reject the mind-body dualism, as Dewey, Johnson, etc. did, then we are constantly engaged in interactions with the world and others, and can thus consider the act of thinking from our own experiences. Inspired by an experimentalist conception of school and life, as well as the method of inquiry developed by Dewey, the Philosophy for Children program provides an inquiry process that invites participants to conceptualize and reason philosophically in a collaborative manner. Do these practices implement an embodied cognition? To find out, we selected a discussion as a case study and analyzed it based on the observation that the issue to be discussed by the participants - “where do thoughts come from?” contains two image schemas: path (come from) and source (where). We have noted a variety and a significant number of expressions (“they come from within”, “they come from what happens outside”, etc.) whose analysis enhances a better understanding of how an experience of understanding the origins of our thoughts fits into the discourse and contributes to a collective conceptualization of “thinking”. Keywords: image schemas, perceptual experience, conceptualisation, community of philosophical inquiry, experimentalism "

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 210-212
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Sensory Response ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

Perception is central in our engagement with the world. It is experiential, representational, and causally connected with its objects. It is a discriminative sensory response to multifarious phenomena in our experience of the world. Perceptual experience embodies phenomenally distinctive states. Those states, as phenomenally representational and discriminatively responsive to our environment, have a kind of content by which they guide us as agents in the physical realm. In these ways, and most prominently in its phenomenal elements, perception is mental, in the broad sense that entails some engagement of the mind. But I have distinguished the mental from the intellectual and argued that perception is neither fundamentally intellectual nor, in its simplest forms, belief-entailing....

Ayurvedic perspective of Cosmetology

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr.Sumedh Wasnik ◽  
Tanuja Naik ◽  
Anita Ghodke ◽  
Vaibhav Sulakhe
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Toxic Materials ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Four Levels ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Concept Of Beauty ◽  
Physically Attractive

Cosmetology deals with various aspect of beauty. Beauty is the quality of being physically attractive, the qualities in a person or a thing that give pleasure to the senses or the mind. It is the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. Beauty is the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, colour, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else. It pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. Beauty of person gives perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction. According to Ayurveda, the concept of beauty includes physical, mental, social and spiritual elements. Ayurveda is the science of health care and healing, works on four levels body, Breath, mind and spirit. When these are in perfect harmony, a person radiates with inner and outer beauty. In fact, the concept of beauty and cosmetics is as old as mankind and civilization. Ama (toxic materials) inside our body make a person ugly and diseased and Sodhana i.e. Panchakarma (purification) is the best therapeutic intervention to eliminate body toxins. Being Ayurveda as a life science and tradition of India, soon India will be the global cosmetic industry’s capital because of advantages of Ayurveda and Ayurvedic medicines.

scholarly journals Effects of visuomotor delays on the control of movement and on perceptual localization in the presence and absence of visual targets

2019 ◽  
Vol 122 (6) ◽  
pp. 2259-2271
Author(s):  
Guy Avraham ◽  
Erez Sulimani ◽  
Ferdinando A. Mussa-Ivaldi ◽  
Ilana Nisky
Keyword(s):  
Visual Target ◽  
Sensory System ◽  
Delayed Feedback ◽  
Perceptual Bias ◽  
Hand Position ◽  
State Information ◽  
Reaching Movement ◽  
Current State ◽  
Visual Targets ◽  
The Invisible

The sensory system constantly deals with delayed feedback. Recent studies showed that playing a virtual game of pong with delayed feedback caused hypermetric reaching movements. We investigated whether this effect is associated with a perceptual bias. In addition, we examined the importance of the target in causing hypermetric movements. In a first experiment, participants played a delayed pong game and blindly reached to presented targets. Following each reaching movement, they assessed the position of the invisible cursor. We found that participants performed hypermetric movements but reported that the invisible cursor reached the target, suggesting that they were unaware of the hypermetria and that their perception was biased toward the target rather than toward their hand position. In a second experiment, we removed the visual target, and strikingly, the hypermetria vanished. Moreover, participants reported that the invisible cursor was located with their hand. Taking these results together, we conclude that the adaptation to the visuomotor delay during the pong game selectively affected the execution of goal directed movements, resulting in hypermetria and perceptual bias when movements are directed toward visual targets but not when such targets are absent. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Recent studies showed that adaptation to visuomotor delays causes hypermetric movements in the absence of visual feedback, suggesting that visuomotor delay is represented using current state information. We report that this adaptation also affects perception. Importantly, both the motor and perceptual effects are selective to the representations that are used in the execution of goal-directed movements toward visual targets.

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