Abstract: Jerry Fodor has consistently cited the persistence of illusions--especially the Müller-Lyer illusion--as a principal form of evidence for the informational encapsulation of modular input systems. Fodor proposed that these modules' stereotypical deliverances about how the world appears could serve as a theory-neutral observational foundation for (scientific) knowledge. For a variety of reasons Fodor rejected Paul Churchland's putative counter-examples to these mental modules' cognitive impenetrability. Fodor's discussions suggest that demonstrating modules' cognitive penetrability would hinge on showing that because subjects either (a) acquire some explicit theory or (b) gain wider perceptual experience, they would, in the synchronic case, very quickly cease to experience the illusion or, at any rate, experience a mitigated version of it. Diachronic penetration, by contrast, would involve processes that deliver one of these outcomes over a decidedly longer period. Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits' (1966) research across seventeen cultures shows that culturally influenced differences in visual experience during the first two decades of life substantially affect how people experience the Müller-Lyer stimuli. In some of the societies most people were virtually immune to the illusion. Such findings call Fodor's showcase evidence for the cognitive impenetrability of the visual input system into question and, thereby, threaten to block the path to the theory-neutral, observational consensus that he scouts

Abstract: Although the study of visual perception has made more progress in the past 40 years than any other area of cognitive science, there remain major disagreements as to how closely vision is tied to general cognition. This paper sets out some of the arguments for both sides (arguments from computer vision, neuroscience, Psychophysics, perceptual learning and other areas of vision science) and defends the position that an important part of visual perception, which may be called early vision or just vision, is prohibited from accessing relevant expectations, knowledge and utilities - in other words it is cognitively impenetrable. That part of vision is complex and articulated and provides a representation of the 3-D surfaces of objects sufficient to serve as an index into memory, with somewhat different outputs being made available to other systems such as those dealing with motor control. The paper also addresses certain conceptual and methodological issues, including the use of signal detection theory and event-related potentials to assess cognitive penetration of vision. A distinction is made among several stages in visual processing. These include, in addition to the inflexible early-vision stage, a pre-perceptual attention allocation stage and a post-perceptual evaluation, memory-accessing, and inference stage which provide several different highly constrained ways in which cognition can affect the outcome of visual perception. The paper discusses arguments that have been presented in both computer vision and psychology showing that vision is "intelligent" and involves elements of problem solving". It is suggested that these cases do not show cognitive penetration, but rather they show that certain natural constraints on interpretation, concerned primarily with optical and geometrical properties of the world, have been compiled into the visual system. The paper also examines a number of examples where instructions and "hints" are alleged to affect

Abstract:   In this paper we focus on the modularity of visual functions in the human visual cortex, that is, the specific problems that the visual system must solve in order to achieve recognition of objects and visual space. The computational theory of early visual functions is briefly reviewed and is then used as a basis for suggesting computational constraints on the higher-level visual computations. The remainder of the paper presents neurological evidence for the existence of two visual systems in man, one specialized for spatial vision and the other for object vision. We show further clinical evidence for the computational hypothesis that these two systems consist of several visual modules, some of which can be isolated on the basis of specific visual deficits which occur after lesions to selected areas in the visually responsive brain. We will provide examples of visual modules which solve information processing tasks that are mediated by specific anatomic areas. We will show that the clinical data from behavioral studies of monkeys (Ungerleider and Mishkin 1984) supports the distinction between two visual systems in monkeys, the what system, involved in object vision, and the where system, involved in spatial vision

Abstract: The primary difference between direct and inferential theories of perception concerns the location of perceptual content, the meaning of our perceptions. In inferential theories of perception, these meanings arise inside animals, based upon their interactions with the physical environment. Light, for example, bumps into receptors causing a sensation. The animal (or its brain) performs inferences on the sensation, yielding a meaningful perception. In direct theories of perception, on the other hand, meaning is in the environment, and perception does not depend upon meaning- conferring inferences. Instead the animal simply gathers information from a meaning- laden environment. But if the environment contains meanings, then it cannot be merely physical. This places a heavy theoretical burden on direct theories of perception, a burden so severe that it may outweigh all the advantages to conceiving perception as

Abstract: Since the 1970s, Michael Turvey, Robert Shaw, and William Mace have worked on the formulation of a philosophically-sound and empirically-tractable version of James Gibson’s ecological psychology. It is surely no exaggeration to say that without their theoretical work ecological psychology would have died on the vine because of the high-profile attacks from establishment cognitive scientists (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1981, Ullman 1981). But thanks to Turvey, Shaw and Mace’s work as theorists and, perhaps more importantly, as teachers, ecological psychology is currently flourishing. A generation of students, having been trained by Turvey, Shaw and Mace at Trinity College and/or the University of Connecticut, ecological psychology, are now distinguished experimental psychologists who train their own students in Turvey-Shaw-Mace ecological psychology. Despite the undeniable and lasting importance of Turvey, Shaw and Mace’s theoretical contributions for psychology and the other cognitive science, their work has not received much attention from philosophers. It will get some of that that attention in this paper. I will point to shortcomings in the Turvey-Shaw-Mace approach to ecological psychology, and will offer what I take to be improved versions of two important aspects of it. In particular, I will describe theories of information and of direct perception that differ from the Turvey-Shaw-Mace account

Abstract: James J. Gibson’s ecological theory of perception (1966, 1979) is striking in many ways. It is not merely a theory of perception, but also a theory of what the world is made up of, a metaphysics, and how we can know it, an epistemology. Furthermore, the metaphysics and epistemology Gibson describes are very unusual by present standards. Indeed, Gibson very clearly intended that his theory of perception seem old-fashioned, even pre-Modern. Witness, for example, the first chapter of Gibson’s posthumous An Ecological

Abstract: In her essay “Information, Perception and Action”, Claire Michaels reaches two conclusions that run very much against the grain of ecological psychology. First, she claims that affordances are not perceived, but simply acted upon; second, because of this, perception and action ought to be conceived separately. These conclusions are based upon a misinterpretation of empirical evidence which is, in turn, based upon a conflation of two proper objects of perception: objectively with properties and affordances

Abstract: I examine the central theoretical construct of ecological psychology, the concept of an affordance. In the first part of the paper, I illustrate the role affordances play in Gibson's theory of perception. In the second part, I argue that affordances are to be understood as dispositional properties, and explain what I take to be their characteristic background circumstances, triggering circumstances and manifestations. The main purpose of my analysis is to give affordances a theoretical identity enriched by Gibson's visionary insight, but independent of the most controversial claims of the Gibsonian movement

Abstract: In this paper I aim to present an explanation of object permanence that is derived from an ecological account of perceptually based action. In understanding why children below a certain age do not search for occluded objects, one must first understand the process by which these children perform certain intentional actions on non-occluded items; and to do this one must understand the role affordances play in eliciting retrieval behaviour. My affordance-based explanation is contrasted with Shinskey and Munakata's graded representation account; and although I do not reject totally the role representations play in initiating intentional action I nevertheless maintain that only by incorporating direct perception into an account of object permanence can a fuller understanding of this phenomenon be achieved

Abstract: Consider for a moment the spatial and chromatic dimensions of your visual expe- rience. Suppose that as you gaze about the room you see a table, some books, and papers. Ignore for now the fact that you immediately recognize these objects to be a table with books and papers on it. Concentrate on how the table looks to you: its top spreads out in front of you, stopping at edges beyond which lies unfilled space, leading to more or less distant chairs, shelves, or expanses of floor. The books and paper on the table top create shaped visual boundaries between areas of different color, within which there may be further variation of color or visual texture. Propelled by a slight breeze, a sheet of paper slides across the table, and you experience its smooth motion before it floats out of sight