Kravitz, Dwight

Lupyan, Gary

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UC MercedProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science SocietyTitleCollapsing Content and Process: Mental Representations are not Static and the Brain is not a ComputerPermalinkhttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sm22307JournalProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 31(31)ISSN1069-7977AuthorsKravitz, DwightLupyan, GaryPublication Date2009 Peer reviewedeScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital LibraryUniversity of CaliforniaCollapsing Content and Process:  Mental Representations are not Static and the Brain is not a Computer   Gary Lupyan (lupyan@sas.upenn.edu) University of Pennsylvania 3401 Walnut St. Philadelphia, PA 19104 Dwight Kravitz (kravitzd@mail.nih.gov) National Institutes of Health Bethesda, MD 20892  The assumption A widespread assumption in the cognitive sciences thatcontinues to shape theories from low-level perception to high-level reasoning is that cognitive processes ar distinct from the representations on which they operate. According to this view, the brain is like a computer in which ontent (data) is qualitatively separate from process (operations on the data). We will argue that this critical assumption is largely irreconcilable with data from neuroscience and con-temporary behavioral studies of perception and attention. The problem with the assumption Although there are theoretical, computational, and rhetor-ical advantages to placing strict divisions between process and content, recent findings from a number of domains belie almost every aspect of such a separation. First, the process-content separation requires that “con-tent” comprise largely static representations. That is, be-cause content representations are in a sense encapsulated from downstream processes, they should not be affected by them. Thus, regardless of the high level context of the ob-server, the content should remain the same. This assumption is contradicted by behavioral and electrophysiological find-ings that context has profound impacts at the earliest evels of perceptual processing. Likewise, there is mounting evi-dence that visual attention, rather than selecting from under-lying static representation, modulates representations across multiple levels. For example, Kravitz and Behrmann (2008) have shown that cueing a given object has consequences that extend throughout the visual scene. Second, the division of process and content requires a complex mechanism by which the process can index th static representations that are assumed to comprise cont nt. Consider this problem in the domain of visual attention. One can rapidly attend to any specific item or group of items in a complex visual scene, ranging in complexity from oriented lines to complex objects. If attention cannot have direct access to perception, then such flexibility necessitates that attention have a very powerful method of indexing its con-tent. We discuss why such indexing is neurally implausible. Third, the assumption of separation between content and process has encouraged a modular view of brain organiza-tion resulting in a binding problem. In vision, cortical areas are thought to be specialized to process particular aspects of visual stimuli (e.g. color in V4, objects in IT).  But in order for one to attend to e.g., a red car in a scene, there must be some way to bind together outputs of allegedly modular areas. Recent work has shown that retinotopic position re-mains an important aspect of visual representations even in far anterior visual regions (Kravitz, Vinson, & Baker, 2008). This and related evidence paints a view of the visual ystem in which individual regions have some specialization, but still maintain sensitivity to other perceptual dimensions. Thus, a system that appears to be composed of distinct modules may actually be highly interactive, “soft-assembling” dynamic representations of stimuli that span many levels of representation.  The solution and its implications We argue that content and process must arise within the same system (Lupyan, Kravitz, et al., in prep). One imme-diate implication of collapsing content and process is that no representations are truly static or veridical. In this view, attention functions in situ with perceptual representations. The effects of context and intent can potentially alter all content. All representations, even those contained  early perceptual areas are dynamic and capture a blend of the state of the world and the internal state of the observer. Thus, attending to, categorizing, or making a decision about a stimulus—even one that is physically present in the cur-rent environment—alters its representation at all leve s.  Working on these assumptions, Lupyan and colleagues have shown that even low-level visual processing of famili-ar items is flexibly modulated by prior knowledge such as the items’ conceptual category as well as the verbal label associated with the item. This approach opens new ways of understanding neural organization: in this view structure is highly reflective of function, rather than being arbitrary or genetically specified.  Kravitz, D., & Behrmann, M. (2008). The space of an object: Object atten-tion alters the spatial gradient in the surround. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Human Perception and Performance, 34(2), 298-309. Kravitz, D. J., Vinson, L. D., & Baker, C. I. (2008). How position depen-dent is visual object recognition? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(3), 114-22. Lupyan, G. (2007). Reuniting Categories, Language, and Perception. In Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1247-1252). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Lupyan, G. (2008). The Conceptual Grouping Effect: Categories Matter (and named categories matter more). Cognition, 108 , 566-577. Lupyan, G., Kravitz, D., Baker, C., Behrmann, M., Elman, J., Goldstone, R., Lamme, V., Martin, A., McClelland, J., Spivey, M., Plaut, D., Thompson-Schill, S. The Dynamic Nature of Mental Representations: Towards a Collapse of Content and Process. MS in prepLupyan, G., & Spivey, M. J. (2008). Now You See It, Now You Don't: Verbal but not visual cues facilitate visual object detection. In Pro-ceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science So-ciety (pp. 963-968). Austin, TX. Lupyan, G., & Spivey, M. (2008). Perceptual processing is facilitated by ascribing meaning to novel stimuli. Current Biology, 18 (10), R410-R412.  2607

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Collapsing Content and Process: Mental Representations are not Static and the Brain is not a Computer

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Collapsing Content and Process: Mental Representations are not Static and the Brain is not a Computer

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