@article{ref1,
title="Cognition does not affect perception: evaluating the evidence for 'top-down' effects",
journal="Behavioral and brain sciences",
year="2015",
author="Firestone, Chaz and Scholl, Brian J.",
volume="39",
number="",
pages="e229-e229",
abstract="What determines what we see? In contrast to the traditional &quot;modular&quot; understanding of perception, according to which visual processing is encapsulated from higher-level cognition, a tidal wave of recent research alleges that states such as beliefs, desires, emotions, motivations, intentions, and linguistic representations exert direct top-down influences on what we see. There is a growing consensus that such effects are ubiquitous, and that the distinction between perception and cognition may itself be unsustainable. We argue otherwise: none of these hundreds of studies - either individually or collectively - provide compelling evidence for true top-down effects on perception, or &quot;cognitive penetrability&quot;. In particular, and despite their variety, we suggest that these studies all fall prey to only a handful of pitfalls. And whereas abstract theoretical challenges have failed to resolve this debate in the past, our presentation of these pitfalls is empirically anchored: in each case, we show not only how certain studies could be susceptible to the pitfall (in principle), but how several alleged top-down effects actually are explained by the pitfall (in practice). Moreover, these pitfalls are perfectly general, with each applying to dozens of other top-down effects. We conclude by extracting the lessons provided by these pitfalls into a checklist that future work could use to convincingly demonstrate top-down effects on visual perception. The discovery of substantive top-down effects of cognition on perception would revolutionize our understanding of how the mind is organized; but without addressing these pitfalls, no such empirical report will license such exciting conclusions.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0140-525X",
doi="10.1017/S0140525X15000965",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X15000965"
}