The Attentional Shaping Of Perceptual Experience

This monograph presents a clear account of when and how attentional processes can shape perceptual experience. This argument is based on the prediction-error minimization model of the mind. The author believes that the topic of attention should take a more central role in the debate about the influence of cognition on perception. Inside, he shows how this can be possible. The hypothesis that cognition may shape perceptual experience has been traditionally labeled as the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience. Cognitive penetrability is relevant for several debates in philosophy and cognitive science. It tackles the possibility of gathering genuine knowledge on the basis of perceptual information about the world delivered by sensory channels. The problem, the author notes, is that if our previously acquired belief can shape current perceptual experiences, such experiences cannot serve as an adequate source of justification in retaining those beliefs or even forming new ones. He argues that cognitive penetration may sometimes happen through attentional processes, but that its occurrence need not undermine perceptual justification. The book provides an overview of the cognitive penetrability debate. The author discusses evidence that supports the occurrence of this phenomenon. Overall, this investigation offers readers a philosophical discussion of attention based on the biased-competition theory. It argues that attention is a property of mental representations that emerges from a metacognitive competition process.

In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics to do with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and action. This will be the book on the philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers and psychologists.

What is it about art that can be so captivating? How is it that we find value in the often odd and abstract objects and events we call artworks? William P. Seeley proposes that artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts that have been intentionally designed to direct attention to critical stylistic features that reveal their point, purpose, or meaning. In developing this view, Seeley argues that there is a lot we can learn about the value of art from interdisciplinary research focused on our perceptual engagement with artworks. Recent breakthroughs in cognitive science and behavioral science can explain how we recognize artworks and how we differentiate them from more quotidian artifacts. Seeley pushes this line of reasoning, showing how cognitive science can help reveal the way artworks function as a unique source of value. He argues that our interactions with artworks draw on a broad base of shared artistic and cultural norms constitutive of different categories of art. Cognitive systems integrate this information into our experience of art, guiding attention and shaping what we perceive. Our understanding and appreciation of artworks is therefore carried in our perceptual experience of them. Attentional Engines explores the pitfalls and potential of this interdisciplinary strategy for understanding art. It articulates a cognitivist theory of art grounded in perceptual psychology and neuroscience and demonstrates its application to a range of puzzles in the philosophy of the arts. This includes questions about the nature of depiction, the role played by metakinesis in dance appreciation, the nature of musical expression, and the power of movies. The interdisciplinary and provocative theories Seeley presents will appeal to scholars and students interested in aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of art, and cognitive science.

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical interest in perception. Perception is the basic and primary way in which we get in touch with our world in cognitive and active terms: by perceiving the surrounding world, we come to form true beliefs about it and successfully inhabit it through our actions. As such, correctly understanding the nature of perception will help to shed light on many other central philosophical issues. This book offers a defence of the content view of perceptual experience, of the idea that our perceptual experiences represent the world as being a certain way, and so have representational content. An articulated framework is provided for understanding the nature of these experiences in terms of contentful states, as well as for exploring the epistemological, semantical and phenomenological consequences of such an understanding. In addition, the book also includes a detailed and systematic account of how we conceive and ascribe the content of our experiences and their relation to our phenomenology, beliefs and knowledge of the world.

Theatre and Aural Attention investigates what it is to attend theatre by means of listening. Focusing on four core aural phenomena in theatre – noise, designed sound, silence, and immersion - George Home-Cook concludes that theatrical listening involves paying attention to atmospheres.

This volume explores how advances in the fields of evolutionary neuroscience and cognitive psychology are informing media studies with a better understanding of how humans perceive, think and experience emotion within mediated environments. The book highlights interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to the production and reception of cinema, television, the Internet and other forms of mediated communication that take into account new understandings of how the embodied brain senses and interacts with its symbolic environment. Moreover, as popular media shape perceptions of the promises and limits of brain science, contributors also examine the representation of neuroscience and cognitive psychology within mediated culture.

Even before the deep learning revolution, the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) was already changing drastically in the 90s. Embodied intelligence, it was proposed, must play a crucial role in the design of intelligent machines. This new wave was inspired by what is today known as Embodied and Enactive Cognitive Science or E-Cognition, which considers that cognitive activity does not reduce to the intellectual capacities of agents being able to represent their environments. E-cognition set AI and robotics in a new direction, in which intelligent machines are required to interact with the environment, and where this interaction does not reduce to explicit representations or prespecified algorithms. These ideas revolutionized the way we think about intelligent machines and cognition, but these theoretical advances are only partially reflected in modern approaches to AI and machine learning (ML). Despite deeply impressive achievements, AI/ML still struggles to recapitulate the kinds of intelligence we find in natural systems, whether we are considering individual insects (e.g. simultaneous localization and mapping), or swarm behaviour (e.g. forum sensing and ensemble inferences), and especially the kinds of flexibility and high-level reasoning characteristic of human cognition.