Cognitive Science Colloquium

Recent discoveries concerning cognitive effects on perception have led philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists to question whether there is any principled difference between cognition and perception.  In a recent position paper on the predictive coding approach to perception, Andy Clark says “the lines between perception and cognition [are] fuzzy, perhaps even vanishing’’ (2013, p. 190).  Gary Lupyan (Lupyan, 2015) says “I am supporting a collapse of perception and cognition which makes the whole question of the penetrability of one by the other, ill-posed. But I would be thrilled if I my arguments contribute to the eventual demise of this question.”  Even those  who favor some kind of a distinction between cognition and perception seem to allow for perceptions or perceptual processes that are also cognitions or cognitive processes.  I will argue that these approaches are wrongheaded and that there is a principled difference between perception and cognition in both format and functional role, and that the cognitive effects on perception can be accommodated within a perspective that recognizes this joint in nature.