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Opening Up Vision: The Case Against Encapsulation

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Abstract

Many have argued that early visual processing is encapsulated from the influence of higher-level goals, expectations, and knowledge of the world. (Early vision is thought to result in perception of three-dimensional shapes and surfaces, prior to object recognition and categorization.) Here we confront the main arguments offered in support of such a view, showing that they are unpersuasive. We also present evidence of top–down influences on early vision, emphasizing data from cognitive neuroscience. Our conclusion is that encapsulation is not a defining feature of visual processing. But we take this conclusion to be quite modest in scope, readily incorporated into mainstream vision science.

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Notes

  1. See Masrour et al. (2015) on the methodological limitations of behavioral evidence for resolving the encapsulation debate.

  2. Firestone and Scholl (forthcoming) identify six pitfalls that befall studies purporting to show top-down effects. We think that each of the six confounds is a special case of the three discussed by Pylyshyn (1999).

  3. We should note that there are many others besides Fodor and Pylyshyn who defend the encapsulation of vision, at least in some form. Deroy (2013), for example, argues that the kinds of color-discrimination effects discussed by Macpherson (2012) (that is, cases where objects with characteristic colors are perceived differently from color-neutral objects) can be explained with a more enriched model of perceptual processing. But Deroy’s focus is on just this one strand of evidence, which we ourselves don’t rely on here. More ambitiously, Firestone and Scholl (forthcoming) provide a wide-ranging critique of claims of top–down penetration of vision. But as we have already noted, most of the claims they discuss rely on purely behavioral studies, and they pay scant attention to findings from cognitive neuroscience. Finally, Raftopoulos (2009) draws on an extensive body of empirical research to defend and elaborate the Fodor–Pylyshyn view. We do not have space in this paper for an adequate critique of his account, which would require a paper on its own.

  4. Strikingly, visual illusions like the Müller-Lyer illusion are present in children functionally-blind from birth (who were previously only capable of perceiving gross motion effects such as a hand waved close in front of the face) as soon as they are enabled to see for the first time following cataract surgery and intraocular lens implant (Ghandi et al. 2015).

  5. Recall that Pylyshyn (1999) explicitly allows that intra-modular top–down effects fail to qualify as forms of cognitive penetration. So even staunch advocates of encapsulation allow that perceptual processing involves an interaction between incoming signals and stored information.

  6. For a recent replication and elaboration of Li et al.’s (2004) results, see Ramalingam et al. (2013). For related data, see Ghose and Bearl (2010) and McManus et al. (2011). For a recent review of the literature, see Gilbert and Li (2013).

  7. A tuning-curve represents a neuron’s response profile to changes in a stimulus along a particular dimension. (Roughly, it tells us what, along that dimension, the neuron represents.) A flat tuning-curve in response to some change in the stimulus indicates that the neuron is not displaying sensitivity to the manipulated stimulus property.

  8. Note that it is quite possible that the macaques acquired some perceptual expertise over the course of the training periods. Perceptual learning is thought to be a long-term change to how visual information is processed. But recall that the effect here is context sensitive. Any expertise gained from, for example, performing the side-flank task must be flexibly deployed in accordance with the current goal. So even if perceptual learning occurs in this experiment, there must be some sort of contentful relation between the high-level goal and visual processing.

  9. How is it possible for goals to modulate visual processing in this way? Li et al. (2004) explain that in addition to multiple feed-forward and feed-back connections between V1 neurons and higher areas, there are also strong lateral connections among neurons in V1 itself. These can have either excitatory or inhibitory roles, making the activity of one neuron partly dependent upon the activities of many of its neighbors. So a plausible explanation is that a change in task modulates how a given V1 neuron is influenced by some of these neighbors rather than others. That is, the effect of the side-flank task on a V1 neuron amounts to telling it something like, “be more influenced in your response by these nearby neurons [which code for the distances between the center line and the side-flanks] than by those ones [which code for the alignment of the center line with the end-flanks].”

  10. Post-experiment interviews revealed that 80 % of participants suspected no relationship between the auditory cue and orientation of motion. Of the remaining 20 %, one participant was aware of the true significance of the cues, one was aware of a relationship, but had their predictive character reversed; and the remaining three participants suspected a relationship between just one of the auditory cues and presented orientation.

  11. This kind of implicit biasing of visual processing doesn’t involve conscious beliefs or desires penetrating vision, of course. As a result, many supporters of visual modularity may not regard such cases as particularly interesting counterexamples. Given that much of cognition operates at an implicit level, however, we fail to see why this should make the effects any less important.

  12. Continuous flash suppression is a form of binocular rivalry, in which different stimuli are presented to each eye simultaneously. But in continuous flash suppression the stimuli presented to one eye consist of high-contrast dynamically changing Mondrian-like colored patterns. These tend to dominate conscious experience, with the stimulus presented to the other eye taking considerable time to become visible.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Tom Carlson, Chaz Firestone, Zoe Jenkins, Peter Kok, Eric Mandelbaum, Jake Quilty-Dunn, and an anonymous referee for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, Skinner Building, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Ryan Ogilvie & Peter Carruthers

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Correspondence to Peter Carruthers.

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Ogilvie, R., Carruthers, P. Opening Up Vision: The Case Against Encapsulation. Rev.Phil.Psych. 7, 721–742 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0294-8

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