Abstract
It is a distinctive mark of normal conscious perception that perceived objects are experienced as actually present in one’s surroundings. The aim of this paper is to offer a phenomenologically accurate and empirically plausible account of the cognitive underpinning of this feature of conscious perception, which I shall call perceptual presence (PP). The paper begins with a preliminary characterization of (PP). I then consider and criticize the seminal account of (PP) proposed by Mohan Matthen. In the remainder of the paper I put forward and defend my own attentional account. I first outline a simple version of the view by focusing on vision and then extend it to audition. After discussing the case of depersonalization, I consider some objections. The last objection, in particular, will motivate a refinement of the attentional account for the visual case. The paper ends with some remarks mainly about the specificity of the visual case vis-à-vis the auditory one.
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Notes
This term is also employed by Dokic (2012: p. 193), who in the same paper also talks of “feeling of presence”. Elsewhere Dokic uses the term “feeling of reality” (see Dokic and Martin 2012; Dokic 2016). Matthen (2010) talks of “feeling of presence” and Farkas (2013) of “sense of reality”. Here is why I prefer the label “perceptual presence”. First, it is better to avoid terms like “sense” and “feeling”, for they seem to imply, and surely suggest, that the nature of the feature in question is phenomenological. That this is the case, however, is an open question. (See further below in this section for this.) Second, that feature seems better described in terms of “presence” than of “reality”. If I look at a tennis match on the TV, I surely experience the players as real, though I don’t experience them as “really there” in the same sense in which my computer keyboard is “really there”, to stick to Matthen’s example. (Thanks to Enrico Terrone, who made me appreciate this point.) Since theoretically neutral and phenomenologically more accurate, the term “perceptual presence” is thus a better candidate.
The same kind of contrast can be drawn between perception and imagery, which is arguably not identical with imagination (on this point, see Nanay 2016: pp. 66–67). As this difference has no bearing on the arguments presented in this paper, I shall simply ignore it and talk in terms of imagination throughout.
This last notion is admittedly vague. Discussion in Sect. 6 will help to qualify it.
As we saw, imagination is another usual contrast case to perception when it comes to (PP). So why not draw further on this contrast? The reason is that the case of imagination is so intricate that no even remotely satisfying treatment could be aimed at on this occasion. To highlight the complications, let me just name two of them. First, as already noted (see footnote 2), both imagination and imagery can be contrasted with perception. So one would need to clarify the difference between them and, ideally, deal with both. Second, though hallucinations typically display (PP), some have argued that they are just a specific kind of imagination (Allen 2015) or imagery (Nanay 2016). If one of these views is true, it is thus simply false that imagination or imagery is, as such, a contrast case when it comes to (PP). As these are arguably not the only troubles awaiting an appropriate examination of imagination and/or imagery, I shall leave this issue to further work.
Husserl (1997 [1907]: §5) already makes this point by appealing to resisted hallucinations.
Matthen’s proposal is similar, see (2010: pp. 114–115).
Two things to note here. First, the labels “motion-guiding vision” and “descriptive vision” are not of common use in the literature, as far as I know. Here, I adopt Matthen’s terminology for ease of discussion. Second, Matthen stresses that his argument is committed only to the functional independence of the two visual systems, and not also to their neuroanatomical segregation. Though in my paper I sometimes use the more current labels “ventral” and “dorsal”, which refer to specific regions of the brain, I do not assume that no relevant neuroanatomical connection between the two systems exists, nor that Matthen’s proposal requires this to be the case.
Studies on subjects with normal vision show that “invisible” objects that remain undetected by the ventral stream can elicit responses in the dorsal stream (see Fang and He 2005). As no awareness whatsoever of such objects is reported, activation of the dorsal stream can occur (as in blindsight) in the complete absence of conscious perceptual experience and, a fortiori, of (PP).
For instance, VHs in Parkinson disease correlate with degraded visual input due to reduced contrast and color discrimination (see Diederich et al. 2005).
The notion of “incorrect proto-object” employed by Collerton is somewhat ambiguous. A proto-object may be incorrect because it misrepresents an item in the environment, or because no suitable item is there at all. Given that Collerton’s model is about hallucinations, the second option is here the pertinent one. However, there might as well be visual illusions caused by a malfunction of object-based attention. In such cases, if they exist, the notion should then be read in the first sense. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.)
Sometimes this specific feeling of world-directed unreality is described in the literature as the mark of derealization, a condition that is in turn categorized as part of a broader depersonalization/derealization disorder.
Importantly, Guralnik et al. (2000) suggest that the detected short-term memory deficits are “secondary to difficulties focusing, perceiving, and taking in new information” (107). Attention deficits seem thus to be the primary problem here.
Compare the following report: “At times, the most common, familiar objects can seem foreign, as if I am looking at them for the first time. An American flag, for instance. It’s instantly recognizable, and immediately means something to everyone. But if I look at it for more than a moment, I just see colors and shapes on a piece of cloth” (Simeon and Abugel 2006: p. 7).
In their earlier model, Anne Hillstrom and Steven Yantis defend the opposite claim. Their basic contention is that “the appearance of new objects, and little else [i.e. no other features like motion], captures attention” (Hillstrom and Yantis 1994: p. 409). What’s relevant for the purposes of my paper is that their model allows an equally plausible account of “fleeting glimpses”. Accordingly (see Hillstrom and Yantis 1994: p. 410), the visual field is parsed and segmented into potential objects. Some objects are selected by object-based attention and corresponding object-files are created. When a new object abruptly appears, attention is captured towards it and a new object-file is created. If this turns out to be the right picture, my suggestion would then be that a “fleeting glimpse” occurs when the appearance of the new object is too short-lived to allow the relevant object file to be successfully created.
See “Despite the fact that the acuity of attention is increasingly coarser towards the periphery of FA [field of attention], the peripheral attention, however, may play crucial roles in searching objects and in fine adjustment of attention focus”, Yao et al. (2011: p. 4). See also Thorpe et al. (2001), who show that peripheral vision suffices for the detection of animals in natural images.
This may seem to be in tension with a point I made earlier (see Sect. 3). There, I argued that the fact that hallucinated objects occupy the focus of one’s visual field supports the view that they are selected by visual attention. But that claim requires only that visual attention is usually allocated focally, not that it is necessarily focal.
For similar considerations see also Dokic (2012: p. 394).
In Sect. 5 I argued that the spatial attention deficits found in depersonalization possibly impair the binding and selection of visual objects. Given the present refinement of the account, and assuming that the feeling of unreality typical of depersonalization consists in a lack of (PP), my position requires only that such deficits impair the correct formation of three-dimensional visual objects.
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Acknowledgements
I presented versions of this paper at the University of Porto, at London Institute of Philosophy and at the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris. On all occasions I greatly benefitted from discussion with the audience. Special thanks are due to Roberta Locatelli, Hong Yu Wong and, in particular, Jérôme Dokic. I’d also like to thank Enrico Terrone for his very helpful feedback on an earlier draft and the two anonymous referees of this journal for their insightful suggestions and comments. Finally, I’d like to thank BIAL Foundation for supporting this research.
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Riccardi, M. Perceptual presence: an attentional account. Synthese 196, 2907–2926 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1588-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1588-4