What can sensorimotor enactivism learn from studies on phenomenal adaptation in atypical perceptual conditions? : A commentary on Rick Grush and colleagues

Grush et al. present a pilot study on visual adaptation to a remapped color spectrum. Their preliminary results, being far from conclusive, only partially support the hypothesis that there might exist a form of adaptation to color rotation and color constancy. Proving such flexibility in color vision would substantiate the investigators’ attempt to localize their research outcomes in the context of philosophical theories of enactive perception. In spite of some limitations, the study exhibits a worthy and novel approach to the old question of color inverted experience, intended to provide an interdisciplinary account that is both empirically sensitive and philosophically potent. For the progress of the current investigation it would be constructive not only to conduct empirical follow-up studies, but also to conceptually refine the notion of “phenomenal adaptation”, which is the central phenomenon studied here. based upon a distinction between phenomenal conservatism that accepts only perceptual phenomenology with sensory contents and phenomenal liberalism that acknowledges higher-level contents of perception and cognitive phenomenology, i differentiate between adaptation of the sensory sort and adaptation in the cognitive aspects of experience. this distinction is used to highlight two different ways of understanding the notion of “phenomenal adaptation”, exhibited by the target article and this commentary. grush et al. seem to suggest that phenomenal and (non-phenomenal) semantic adaptation are different forms of a more general phenomenon of adaptation. however, they do not give any explicit example of the genus of adaptation of which these types are a species. i contend, in turn, that there is no need to produce such subclasses of the notion; semantic adaptation involving higher-level non-sensory states may also be understood as phenomenal. this follows from phenomenal liberalism. i argue that what is being processed in the course of phenomenal adaptation is phenomenal character understood in an expansive way that includes high-level contents. the claim may have an important effect on related empirical work. as a result, enactive sensorimotor adaptation does not have to be seen as adaptation of the sensory sort, but as adaptation in the cognitive aspects of experience, such as altered expectations, or beliefs about or sensitivity to kinds of objects encountered in perceptual experience. this phenomenally liberal reading would provide an appropriately more capacious notion than the adaptation of the sort offered by grush et al. finally, i claim that the lessons for enactive theories of color perception may be expanded beyond the implications of the color rotation study. this is demonstrated by turning to confirmatory and challenging cases of atypical perceptual conditions and color modifications, such as synesthetic color experiences

Psychophysiological evidence for the genuineness of swimming-style colour synaesthesia

a b s t r a c t Recently, swimming-style colour synaesthesia was introduced as a new form of synaesthesia. A synaesthetic Stroop test was used to establish its genuineness. Since Stroop interference can occur for any type of overlearned association, in the present study we used a modified Stroop test and psychophysiological synaesthetic conditioning to further establish the genuineness of this form of synaesthesia. We compared the performance of a swimming-style colour synaesthete and a control who was trained on swimming-style colour associations. Our results showed that behavioural aspects of swimming-style colour synaesthesia can be mimicked in a trained control. Importantly, however, our results showed a psychophysiological conditioning effect for the synaesthete only. We discuss the theoretical relevance of swimming-style colour synaesthesia according to different models of synaesthesia. We conclude that swimming-style colour synaesthesia is a genuine form of synaesthesia, can be mimicked behaviourally in non-synaesthetes, and is best explained by a re-entrant feedback model

The sun is no fun without rain : Physical environments affect how we feel about yellow across 55 countries

Across cultures, people associate colours with emotions. Here, we test the hypothesis that one driver of this cross-modal correspondence is the physical environment we live in. We focus on a prime example – the association of yellow with joy, – which conceivably arises because yellow is reminiscent of life-sustaining sunshine and pleasant weather. If so, this association should be especially strong in countries where sunny weather is a rare occurrence. We analysed yellow-joy associations of 6625 participants from 55 countries to investigate how yellow-joy associations varied geographically, climatologically, and seasonally. We assessed the distance to the equator, sunshine, precipitation, and daytime hours. Consistent with our hypotheses, participants who live further away from the equator and in rainier countries are more likely to associate yellow with joy. We did not find associations with seasonal variations. Our findings support a role for the physical environment in shaping the affective meaning of colour.Peer reviewe

Perception-Cognition Interface and Cross-Modal Experiences: Insights into Unified Consciousness

The present Research Topic explores closely related aspects of mental functioning, namely an interplay between perception and cognition, interactions among various sensory modalities, and finally, more or less unified conscious experiences arising in the context of these relations. Contributions emphasize a high flexibility observed in perception and may be seen as potential challenges to the traditional modular architecture of perceptual systems. Although the articles describe different phenomena, they follow one common theme - to investigate broadly understood unified experience - by studying either perception-cognition integration or the integration between sensory modalities. These integrative processes may well apply to subpersonal unconscious representations. However, the aim here is to approach phenomenal experience and thus a straightforward way of thinking about it is in terms of conscious perception. Putting together scientific and philosophical concerns, this special issue encourages extending the study of perceptual experience beyond the single sense perception to advance our understanding of the complex interdependencies between different sensory modalities, other mental domains, and various kinds of unifying relations within conscious experience. It exhibits a remarkable need to study these phenomena in tangent, and so, the authors examine a variety of ways in which our perceptual experiences may be cross-modal or multisensory, integrated, embodied, synesthetic, cognitively penetrated, or otherwise affected by top-down influences. The Research Topic comprises theoretical and empirical contributions of such fields as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience in the form of hypothesis and theory articles, original research articles, opinion papers, reviews, and commentaries.The present Research Topic explores closely related aspects of mental functioning, namely an interplay between perception and cognition, interactions among various sensory modalities, and finally, more or less unified conscious experiences arising in the context of these relations. Contributions emphasize a high flexibility observed in perception and may be seen as potential challenges to the traditional modular architecture of perceptual systems. Although the articles describe different phenomena, they follow one common theme - to investigate broadly understood unified experience - by studying either perception-cognition integration or the integration between sensory modalities. These integrative processes may well apply to subpersonal unconscious representations. However, the aim here is to approach phenomenal experience and thus a straightforward way of thinking about it is in terms of conscious perception. Putting together scientific and philosophical concerns, this special issue encourages extending the study of perceptual experience beyond the single sense perception to advance our understanding of the complex interdependencies between different sensory modalities, other mental domains, and various kinds of unifying relations within conscious experience. It exhibits a remarkable need to study these phenomena in tangent, and so, the authors examine a variety of ways in which our perceptual experiences may be cross-modal or multisensory, integrated, embodied, synesthetic, cognitively penetrated, or otherwise affected by top-down influences. The Research Topic comprises theoretical and empirical contributions of such fields as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience in the form of hypothesis and theory articles, original research articles, opinion papers, reviews, and commentaries

Perceptual expertise and object recognition: An explanatory task for modularists and antimodularists

Dustin Stokes’s book contributes to one of the continuing debates in empirically informed philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences which concerns the relation between thought and perception. The book sheds new light on such questions as: whether vision is modular, informationally encapsulated, and thus cognitively impenetrable or rather the opposite – whether it is malleable and sensitive to further improvements by cognitive states. Stokes supports the latter by referring to empirical evidence on perceptual expertise. Proponents of the modular and malleable architectures of the mind offer different explanations of the phenomena involved in perceptual expertise, viz. object identification and categorization. Interestingly, both views assume some kind of automaticity of the recognitional capacities for identifying and categorizing objects. In this article, I examine the influence of perceptual expertise on object recognition and how the seeming automaticity of object recognition may be approached from the modularist and antimodularist (malleabilist) perspectives

Die Einheit des Bewusstseins und das Phänomen der Synästhesie

Synästhetiker schmecken Berührungen, sehen Farben und Formen, wenn sie Musik hören oder einen Duft riechen. Es wurden auch so außergewöhnliche Formen wie Wochentage-Farben-, Berührung-Geruch- oder Schmerz-Farben-Synästhesien gefunden. Die von Neuro- wissenschaftlern und Philosophen als „Bindung“ genannte Fähigkeit mehrere Reize, die in verschiedenen Hirnarealen verarbeitet werden, miteinander zu koppeln und zu einer einheitlichen Repräsentation bzw. erfahrenen Einheit des Bewusstseins zusammenzufassen, betrifft jeden gesunden Mensch. Synästhetiker sind aber Menschen, deren Gehirne zur „Hyperbindung“ oder zum hyperkohärentem Erleben befähigt sind, da bei ihnen wesentlich mehr solcher Kopplungen entstehen. Das Phänomen der Synästhesie ist schon seit mehreren Jahrhunderten bekannt, aber immer noch ein Rätsel. Bisher glaubten Forscher, solche Phänomene beruhten bloß auf überdurchschnittlich dichten neuronalen Verdrahtungen zwischen sensorischen Hirnregionen. Aus der aktuellen Forschung kann man jedoch schließen, dass die Ursache der Synästhesie nicht allein eine verstärkte Verbindung zwischen zwei Sinneskanälen ist. Laut eigener Studien ist der Sinnesreiz selbst sowie seine fest verdrahteten sensorischen Pfade nicht notwendig für die Auslösung des synästhetischen Erlebens. Eine grundlegende Rolle spielt dabei dessen Bedeutung für einen Synästhetiker. Für die Annahme, dass die Semantik für die synästhetische Wahrnehmung das Entscheidende ist, müssten synästhetische Assoziationen ziemlich flexibel sein. Und genau das wurde herausgefunden, nämlich, dass normalerweise sehr stabile synästhetische Assoziationen unter bestimmten Bedingungen sich auf neue Auslöser übertragen lassen. Weitere Untersuchung betraf die neu entdeckte Schwimmstil-Farbe-Synästhesie, die tritt hervor nicht nur wenn Synästhetiker schwimmen, aber auch wenn sie über das Schwimmen denken. Sogar die Namen dieser charakteristischen Bewegungen können ihre Farbempfindungen auslösen, sobald sie im stimmigen Kontext auftauchen. Wie man von anderen Beispielen in der Hirnforschung weiß, werden häufig benutzte neuronale Pfade im Laufe der Zeit immer stärker ausgebaut. Wenn also ein Synästhetiker auf bestimmte Stimuli häufig stoßt und dabei eine entsprechende Mitempfindung bekommt, kann das mit der Zeit auch seine Hirnanatomie verändern, so dass die angemessenen strukturellen Verknüpfungen entstehen. Die angebotene Erklärung steht also im Einklang mit den bisherigen Ergebnissen. Die vorliegende Dissertation veranschaulicht, wie einheitlich und kohärent Wahrnehmung, Motorik, Emotionen und Denken (sensorische und kognitive Prozesse) im Phänomen der Synästhesie miteinander zusammenhängen. Das synästhetische nicht-konzeptuelle Begleiterlebnis geht mit dem konzeptuellen Inhalt des Auslösers einher. Ähnlich schreiben wir übliche, nicht-synästhetische phänomenale Eigenschaften den bestimmten Begriffen zu. Die Synästhesie bringt solche Verschaltungen einfach auf beeindruckende Weise zum Ausdruck und lässt das mannigfaltige Erleben stärker integrieren.Synesthesia is an extraordinary condition, in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway involuntarily leads to additional consistent phenomenal experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. The phenomenon exhibits various experiential levels: perceptual, bodily, emotional and cognitive, a multitude of phenomenal contents permanently and perceptually bound together within a single unified conscious experience. As such it poses many pressing questions for philosophers, psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists, but also may provide remarkable glimpses into ordinary brain and mind functioning. However, its relevance and explanatory potential have not been fully realized in philosophy of mind and interdisciplinary approaches to perception, consciousness and cognition. A related target phenomenon is the synchronic unity of consciousness which refers to simultaneously appearing and interconnected conscious contents from different modalities. Sometimes it has evoked scepticism in the scientific study of consciousness. Especially in certain pathological states like: split-brain syndrome or dissociative identity disorder, this unity has been claimed to be broken down. Nevertheless, such an apparent breach may only be one extreme within the continuum of the unity of consciousness. The continuum embraces various forms of unity (e.g., access, phenomenal, subject, object and spatial unity) which, depending on the neuropsychological condition, provide different degrees of coherence in unifying selected conscious states. This continuum should be understood as a domain of a qualitative universal (experiential coherence) – a general phenomenal property, instantiated and differentiated by particular conditions from neuropsychopathology, normal and extraordinary perception. In such a pluralistic framework for the unity of consciousness, the phenomenon of synesthesia mirrors the other side of the continuum, where conscious experiences seem to be hypercoherent, i.e., more strongly unified, as a result of integrating cognitive and perceptual processing levels (respective conceptual and non-conceptual contents) and consistent binding extra phenomenal features to their inducers. Therefore, synesthesia seems to be one of the best model phenomena to compare the varying distribution of phenomenal coherence between different neuropsychological conditions. Neurophysiological mechanisms of binding, focused attention and multisensory feature integration associated with relevant phenomenological aspects of synesthesia, are presented here against a background of traditional conceptual issues involved in a philosophical understanding of the unity of consciousness. In this dissertation I argue for two important aspects characterizing the phenomenal unity of consciousness experienced at a time. First, the unity is a highly specific functional property, multirealizable by a diversity of neuropsychological conditions. Second, it is not a binary feature, either fully present or not at all, but a gradable one, as the term ‘continuum’ points out. The introduced gradual instantiation of the unity ranges from pathological dissociative conditions like split-brain and balint- syndrome, through common multisensory perception (synchronesthesia), up to synesthetic perception of associators and projectors with their different degrees of cross-modal integration and experienced perceptual salience. The phenomenal coherence comes in degrees; its distribution varies between two main groups of synesthetes and in comparison to non-synesthetes in various neuropsychological conditions

How to Explain the Automaticity of Object Recognition

Capacities for object recognition are capacities to either categorize a perceived object as belonging to a conceptual category (e.g., being a cat) or identify it as being a specific individual (e.g., being Mr. Whiskers). There is wide agreement that at least some of these capacities operate automatically. Empirical studies have determined that recognition can occur as quickly as within 200ms after stimulus detection. This short time frame excludes any possibility for subjects to exercise conscious control over the development of the process. Though several detailed models have been advanced to explain how recognition processes work (especially in cases of face and object recognition), no adequate explanation of their automaticity has been offered. Here, we advance a proposal according to which recognition is automatic because it is the result of an associative processing mechanism. In particular, we propose that recognition implements a competitive learning mechanism to solve the match-selection problem

Accounting for Action: Challenging the Traditional View of Multimodal Perceptual Objects

In this paper, we argue that action is involved in the creation and representation of perceptual objects. We introduce leading philosophical theories regarding the structure of perceptual objects in modality-independent and multisensory settings. These accounts omit action as a causal factor that can facilitate feature binding and serve as a structural component of perceptual objects. We argue that action does play this causal role due to the connections between the brain’s motor system and perceptual processing as evidenced by neurophysiological and behavioral studies. These data include research on view-independent representations, peripersonal space, and event file coding. We conclude that to omit the influence of the motor system on the structure of perceptual objects is to have an incomplete account of object perception. Motor action is often required to drive the integration of sensory features into corresponding perceptual objects