Changing What You See by Changing What You Know: The Role of Attention

Frontiers in Psychology
Gary Lupyan

Abstract

Attending is a cognitive process that incorporates a person's knowledge, goals, and expectations. What we perceive when we attend to one thing is different from what we perceive when we attend to something else. Yet, it is often argued that attentional effects do not count as evidence that perception is influenced by cognition. I investigate two arguments often given to justify excluding attention. The first is arguing that attention is a post-perceptual process reflecting selection between fully constructed perceptual representations. The second is arguing that attention as a pre-perceptual process that simply changes the input to encapsulated perceptual systems. Both of these arguments are highly problematic. Although some attentional effects can indeed be construed as post-perceptual, others operate by changing perceptual content across the entire visual hierarchy. Although there is a natural analogy between spatial attention and a change of input, the analogy falls apart when we consider other forms of attention. After dispelling these arguments, I make a case for thinking of attention not as a confound, but as one of the mechanisms by which cognitive states affect perception by going through cases in which the same or simi...Continue Reading

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Citations

Sep 25, 2018·Psychological Science·Martin Maier, Rasha Abdel Rahman
May 8, 2018·The Physician and Sportsmedicine·Erin Renee MarchesseaultJohn M Rosene
Dec 19, 2019·Frontiers in Psychology·Carlos Montemayor
Oct 6, 2020·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Gary LupyanAndy Clark
Jul 24, 2021·Cerebral Cortex Communications·Manoj KumarDiane M Beck

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