DIRECT PERCEPTION
Dr. Tom Froese
IIMAS-UNAM
Early developmental psychology
• Mother-fetal interaction
• Neonatal imitation
• Primary intersubjectivity
• Reciprocation
• Secondary intersubjectivity
• Join attention
• Tertiary intersubjectivity
• Languaging – Theory of Mind
• The assumption that social understanding requires
language-like mental representations (i.e. belief states) is
inconsistent with the developmental data.
Key aspects of Theory of Mind
• Theory of Mind is the branch of cognitive science that
investigates how we ascribe mental states to other persons
and how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of
those other persons.
• More accurately, it is the branch that investigates mindreading or
mentalizing or mentalistic abilities.
• These skills are shared by almost all human beings beyond
early childhood.
• They are used to treat other agents as the bearers of
unobservable psychological states and processes, and to
anticipate and explain the agents’ behavior in terms of such
states and processes.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (“Theory of Mind”)
Definition of Theory of Mind
• “In saying that an individual has a theory of mind, we
mean that the individual imputes mental states to himself
and to others (either to conspecifics or to other species as
well).
• A system of inferences of this kind is properly viewed as a
theory,
• first, because such states are not directly observable,
• and second, because the system can be used to make predictions,
specifically about the behavior of other organisms.”
• (Premack & Woodruff, 1978, p. 515, emphasis added)
Classic Theory Theory of Mind
• All these characteristics of [scientific] theories ought also to
apply to children’s understanding of mind, if such
understandings are theories of mind.
• That is, such theories should involve appeal to abstract
unobservable entities, with coherent relations among them.
• Theories should invoke characteristic explanations phrased in terms
of these abstract entities and laws.
• They should also lead to characteristic patterns of predictions,
including extensions to new types of evidence and false predictions,
not just to more empirically accurate prediction.
• Finally, theories should lead to distinctive interpretations of evidence,
a child with one theory should interpret even fundamental facts and
experiences differently than a child with a different theory.
• (Gopnik & Wellman 1992, p. 148)
Bodies as nothing but physical objects?
• A central topic in developmental cognitive science is to investigate how and
when children develop a folk psychology or "theory of mind," the
understanding of others as psychological beings having mental states such
as beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions […].
• It would be a world very foreign to us to restrict our understanding of others
to purely physical terms (e.g., arm extensions, finger curlings, etc.).
• Failure to attribute mental states to people confronts one with a bewildering
series of movements, a jumble of behavior that is difficult to predict and
even harder to explain.
• At a rough level of approximation, this may be something like the state of children with
autism [...].
• However, normal children give elaborate verbal descriptions of the
unobservable psychological states of people,
• indicating that they relate observable actions to underlying mental states.
• (Meltzoff 1995, p. 838)
Criticisms of TTOM
• “We are said to view other people as we view stars,
clouds or geological formations.
• People are just complex objects in our environment
whose behavior we wish to anticipate but whose causal
innards we cannot perceive.
• We therefore proceed by observing the intricacies of their
external behavior and formulating some hypothesis about
how the insides are structured.”
• (Heal, 1986, p. 135)
Just another complex object?
Problematic TOM assumptions
1.
2.
3.
4.
Hidden minds: The problem of social cognition is due to the lack
of access that we have to the other person’s mental states. Since
we cannot directly perceive the other’s beliefs, desires, feelings, or
intentions, we need some extraperceptual cognitive process
(mindreading or mentalizing by way of theoretical inferences or
simulation routines) that will allow us to infer what they are.
Mindreading: These mentalizing processes constitute our primary,
pervasive, or default way of understanding others.
Observational stance: Our normal everyday stance toward the
other person is a third-person, observational stance. We observe
their behaviors in order to explain and predict their actions, or to
theorize or simulate their mental states.
Methodological individualism: understanding others depends
primarily on cognitive capabilities or mechanisms located in an
individual subject, or on processes that take place inside an
individual brain.
• (Gallagher, 2012, p. 188)
The myths of consciousness science
• “To my mind at least three kinds of myth have grown up around
consciousness:
• The Myth of the Inner;
• The Myth of the Hidden; and
• The Myth of the Single.
• I think we need to look at where we can travel if we move away
from that view.”
• Torrance (2009, p. 112)
• Significantly, Theory of Mind looses its central motivation and
justification if it turns out that other minds are not hidden!
Histories of competing ideas
• Theory of Mind was primarily developed by
psychologists and philosophers of cognitive science.
• Step 1: Behaviorism: reaction against introspectionism
• Step 2: Cognitivism: reaction against behaviorism
• Cognitivism == Behaviorism + internal mental representations
• Direct perception was primarily developed by continental
philosophers and ecological psychologists.
• Step 1: Phenomenology: disciplined introspection
• Step 2: Enaction: naturalization of phenomenology
• Enaction == phenomenology + agent-environment dynamics
• Relationship to ecological psychology still being worked out (see, e.g.,
Chemero 2009)
Scheler on empathy
• Scheler also denies that we only perceive the physical
appearance of the other, and that we then, in a subsequent
move, have to infer the existence of a foreign subjectivity.
• “For we certainly believe ourselves to be directly acquainted
• with another person’s joy in his laughter,
• with his sorrow and pain in his tears,
• with his shame in his blushing,
• with his entreaty in his outstretched hands,
• with his love in his look of affection,
• with his rage in the gnashing of his teeth,
• with his threats in the clenching of his fist,
• and with the tenor of his thoughts in the sound of his words.”
Scheler on empathy
• “If anyone tells me that this is not ‘perception’, for it cannot
be so,
• in view of the fact that a perception is simply a ‘complex of
physical sensations’, and that there is certainly no
sensation of another person’s mind nor any stimulus from
such a source,
• I would beg him to turn aside from such questionable
theories and address himself to the phenomenological
facts”
• (Scheler, 1973, p. 254); quoted from Zahavi (2001, p. 152)
Wittgenstein on emotions
• “Look into someone else’s face, and see the
consciousness in it, and a particular shade of
consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indifference,
interest, excitement, torpor, and so on. . . Do you look into
yourself in order to recognize the fury in his face?”
• (Wittgenstein, 1967, § 229)
• “In general I do not surmise fear in him—I see it. I do not
feel that I am deducing the probable existence of
something inside from something outside; rather it is as if
the human face were in a way translucent and that I were
seeing it not in reflected light but rather in its own.”
• (Wittgenstein, 1980, § 170)
Wittgenstein on emotions
• ‘‘We see emotion.”—As opposed to what?—
• We do not see facial contortions and make the inference
that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom.
• We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored,
even when we are unable to give any other description of
the features.
• Grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face.
• (Wittgenstein, 1980, § 570); quote from Gallagher (2008, p. 538)
Direct perception
• “the other person is not something that is entirely hidden away
and inaccessible.
• In seeing the actions and expressive movements of the other
person in the context of the surrounding world, one already
sees their meaning; no inference to a hidden set of mental
states (beliefs, desires, etc.) is necessary.
• When I see the other’s action or gesture, I see (I immediately
perceive) the meaning in the action or gesture. I see the joy or I
see the anger, or I see the intention in the face or in the posture
or in the gesture or action of the other.
• Gallagher (2008, p. 542)
Psychological evidence
• “A growing consensus in social cognition research
accepts the direct perception hypothesis:
• primarily we see what others aim to do; we do not infer it
from their motions.
• Indeed, physical details are overlooked - unless the
action is unintelligible.”
• Froese and Leavens (2014, p. 1)
• We should find that when perceiving others we are not
aware of many of their physical details, especially if the
others’ expressions are highly meaningful.
Incompatible hypotheses
• Theory of Mind:
• Perceptually primary: physical details of the other body
• Secondary cognition: lived expression of the other’s mind
• Direct perception:
• Perceptually primary: lived expression of the other’s mind
• Secondary cognition: physical details of the other body
• Experimentally testable differences:
• How aware are we of the physical details of other’s bodies?
• How independent are these details from their meaning?
Top-down effects on perception
• “Systematic cultural differences in perception and social
cognition have also long been reported by ethnographers (e.g.,
Lillard, 1998; Vinden,1999; Boesch, 2007; Henrich et al.,
2010).
• In psychology there is a field of study dedicated to elucidating
how the natural and socio-cultural context of the perceiver
shapes their experience, including their susceptibility to
illusions (Caparos et al., 2012).
• There is also growing evidence that believing others to be
intentional agents has top-down effects on perception, such as
modulating how their physical movements are perceived
(Moore et al., 2013) and on mechanisms of attentional
selection (Wiese et al., 2012).”
• Quoted from Froese and Leavens (2014, p. 7)
Optical illusions are culture-relative
Caparos et al. (2012)
The “Thatcher Illusion”
Thompson (1980)
The “Thatcher Illusion”
Thompson (1980)
Categorical perception
• “experiments in categorical perception have repeatedly
demonstrated that our perceptual experience is shaped by a
so-called “perceptual magnet effect,” which implies that the
structures of our experience are partially constituted by our
learned conceptual categories (Harnad, 2003).
• Certain physical details will be more or less accessible to
experience depending on the categories by which we make
sense of the world.
• Regarding social perception it has been demonstrated that our
conceptual categories influence how we perceive others’
vocalizations (Iverson et al., 2003) as well as their facial
expressions (Kotsoni et al., 2001).”
• Quoted from Froese and Leavens (2014, p. 7)
Categorical perception of emotions
• “Discriminating others’ facial expressions within a meaningful
category of emotion is more difficult than discriminating them
across different categories, even if they differ by an equal
physical amount (Etcoff and Magee, 1992).
• Specifically, given a computer-generated continuum of facial
expressions from happy to sad, it is more difficult to tell apart
two images of happy faces (or sad faces) than to differentiate
between two images of faces that express an undefined feeling
between happy and sad.”
• Quoted from Froese and Leavens (2014, p. 7)
• “emotional expressions, like colors and speech sounds, are
perceived categorically, not as a direct reflection of their
continuous physical properties” (Etcoff & Magee, 1992, p. 227)
Inattentional and change blindness
• “change blindness” (Simons and Rensink, 2005) and
“inattentional blindness” (Mack, 2003) paradigms in psychology
have provided extensive evidence that we often fail to notice
substantial changes in a visual scene,
• such as the changing color of a car or the disappearance of a plane’s
engines, even when asked to look for any changes taking place.
• Moreover, it appears to the participants that they perceive the
scene as a whole without any factual gaps.
• While unusual orientations, flickering, splashes, and other
artificial techniques help, they are not needed to induce these
effects.
“Gorillas in our midst” experiment
• Participants were instructed to count the number of
basketball passes between members of one team of
basketball players, all wearing the same colored shirts.
• In the middle of the video a person dressed up in a full-
body gorilla suit strolls right into the midst of the passing
players.
• The “gorilla” stops to face the camera, pounds its chest,
and then wanders off. Incredibly, around 50% of people
fail to notice that anything out of the ordinary has taken
place. (Simons and Chabris, 1999)
Person-swapping experiment
• Simons and Levin (1998) had an assistant pretend to be lost on
campus and then to approach a random passerby for directions and
for help in using a map. In the middle of this interaction two other
assistants carrying a large opaque door rudely barged through the
two interactants. During this brief interruption the “lost” person was
quickly replaced with another person playing the same role, and
afterwards the interaction continued.
• Astonishingly, in about 50% of cases the passerby failed to notice that
their interlocutor had been swapped for a different person.
• In one variation of the experiment the two swapped people were both
dressed as construction workers. The researchers comment: “One
subject who failed to detect the change essentially stated our
predicted hypothesis: She said that she had just seen a construction
worker” (Simons and Levin, 1998, p.648).
Is the visual world a grand illusion?
• These findings are surprising from the perspective of Theory of
Mind, but they are in accordance with direct perception.
• Absence of physical details is to be expected if experience is
primarily about situating perceivers in a meaningful and goaldirected relationship with their environment, for example based
on our capacities for action (Noë, 2002).
• And the same applies to our experience of other people. For
example, the person-swapping experiments provide empirical
support for the phenomenological analysis by Gurwitsch
([1931]1979) about how other people are often primarily
perceived in terms of their social roles.
Perception of social roles
• Gurwitsch ([1931]1979) has observed that other people are often
primarily encountered in terms of their social roles, and that their role
partially constitutes the meaning of a situation.
• He therefore remarks that individual role-bearers can be substituted
for each other without much disruption to a social understanding of
the situation, since “only in this role do I have something to do with
him. In this situation, his being is exhausted in the role whose bearer
he is” (Gurwitsch [1931]1979, p. 108).
• Of course, other people only appear as completely defined by their
social roles in some generic kinds of social situation, such as
explaining directions to a stranger (as we will see in more detail
below), handing your ticket to a train conductor, etc.
• More would need to be said about the ways in which others are experienced as
individual people (Ratcliffe, 2007, pp.58–84).
Theory of Mind in schizophrenia
• “Though I certainly recognized her, she became part of the
unreal world.
• I knew her name and everything about her, yet she appeared
strange, unreal like a statue.
• I saw her eyes, her nose, her lips moving, heard her voice and
understood what she said perfectly, yet I was in the presence
of a stranger. [. . .]
• She seems more a statue than ever, a manikin moved by a
mechanism, talking like an automaton. It is horrible, inhuman,
grotesque.”
• [Renee, quoted in (Sechehaye, 1970, pp. 36–38)]
Stanghellini and Ballerini (2011, p. 187)
ToM in Autism-spectrum disorder
• an unmediated and intuitive contact with other persons is unavailable:
• ‘‘I sit down after an exchange to figure out intentions, beliefs, etc. I definitely
need to do this ‘off-line’, after-the-fact, not in real-time’’ [Anonymous, quoted in
(Frith, 2008, p. 68)].
• Other examples that reflect these people’s awareness of the difficulty
in putting themselves into the other person’s shoes, and their need to
do it reflectively rather than intuitively, are the following:
• ‘‘I discovered the differences in thinking when I asked other people about
objects they were less familiar with. . . . I was shocked to discover that many
people saw a vague generalized steeple and sometimes it was a stick figure . .
. where I saw only a whole lot of photo-realistic pictures of specific ones that I
could identify’’ (Grandin, 2009),
• ‘‘given that thinking in a right way is important to me, I need much time to read
how the others lived, how the others did . . .’’ (Sellin, 1993), and ‘‘. . . my
objective is simply to understand . . . to aggregate with those who know’’
(Sellin, 1993).
• Quoted from Froese et al. (2013, p. 1383)
Primacy of ToM as psychopathology
• The claim that TTOM and/or STOM is our primary means
of understanding others is not supported.
• Phenomenology reveals the primacy of perceptual insight in
contrast to the assumption of hidden minds.
• Perceptual psychology demonstrates that physical details are not
easily perceivable and subject to top-down modification.
• This does not mean that we never make use of TTOM
and/or STOM processes to understand others.
• But only in the case of some severe psychopathologies
do we find that :
• Other minds are perceptually inaccessible.
• Understanding other minds requires theorizing and simulating.
Retreat to the sub-personal domain
• “The debate in mindreading between the Theory Theory
and the Simulation Theory is a debate about the
architecture and sub-personal processes responsible
for social cognition.
• Neither account is committed to any view on what phenomenology
tells us is going on in our ordinary interactions.
• With mindreading, there is a process (theorizing and
simulating), and there is a product (an explanation or a
prediction). In general, neither the process nor the product
need be consciously accessible, let alone
phenomenologically transparent.”
• (Spaulding, 2010, p. 131)
• If so, does TOM actually fit the sub-personal processes?
Homework
• Continue reading:
• De Jaegher, H. (2014). Enacción y autonomía: Cómo el mundo
social cobra sentido mediante la participación. In A. Casado da
Rocha (Ed.), Autonomía con otros: Ensayos sobre Bioética (pp.
111-131). Madrid: Plaza y Valdés
• Copy of paper is now available online.
• Note: The deadline of first assignment has been extended
to tomorrow, Wednesday, March 18.
References
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