Seeing absence

Experiences of absence are recognitions that something is missing from the perceived location or a scene. These perceptions vary in duration and intensity, and occur in the mundane cases, such as seeing no mail in the mailbox, and in the more emotionally-laden cases, such as feeling absence of a loved one. Because of how common these experiences are in daily life, perception of absence should be treated as a core element of basic cognition that has high relevance for the daily functioning of human beings. There is a question, however, whether these experiences are, in fact, perceptions. Do we really perceive absences, or do we only think or believe that something is absent? My dissertation defends the claim that we can perceive absences. I present a model of perception of absence based on the perceptual process of template-projection and matching and the paradigm of violation of expectation, and then use this model to explicate key phenomenological characteristics of experiences of absence. An important consequence of my thesis concerns the function of perception. If detection of absence is critical to our survival, then perception is not essentially only object-presenting. The job of the senses is not just to provide a record of what is where, David Marr's postulate about the function of vision, but to report, promptly and efficiently, about what is not where.Doctor of Philosoph

Seeing absence

Intuitively, we often see absences. For example, if someone steals your computer from a café, you may see its absence from your table. But absence perception presents a paradox. On prevailing models of perception, we see only present objects and scenes. So, we cannot literally see an object that is not present. This suggests that we never literally perceive absences, but merely infer that something is absent cognitively on the basis of what we do perceive. But this cognitive explanation does not do justice to the phenomenology. In this paper, I argue that we can literally see absences. I present a model of absence perception based on visual expectations and a matching process. I then reply to two pressing objections

Perception of Absence and Penetration from Expectation

I argue that perception of absence presents a top-down effect from expectations on perception, but then show that this cognitive effect is atypical and indirect. This calls into question usefulness of some of the existing notions of cognitive penetrability of perception and generates new questions about indirect cognitive influences on perception