Projects per year
Abstract
Perceptual awareness depends upon the way in which we engage with our sensorium. This notion is central to active inference, a theoretical framework that treats perception and action as inferential processes. This variational perspective on cognition formalizes the notion of perception as hypothesis testing and treats actions as experiments that are designed (in part) to gather evidence for or against alternative hypotheses. The common treatment of perception and action affords a useful interpretation of certain perceptual phenomena whose active component is often not acknowledged. In this article, we start by considering Troxler fading-the dissipation of a peripheral percept during maintenance of fixation, and its recovery during free (saccadic) exploration. This offers an important example of the failure to maintain a percept without actively interrogating a visual scene. We argue that this may be understood in terms of the accumulation of uncertainty about a hypothesized stimulus when free exploration is disrupted by experimental instructions or pathology. Once we take this view, we can generalize the idea of using bodily (oculomotor) action to resolve uncertainty to include the use of mental (attentional) actions for the same purpose. This affords a useful way to think about binocular rivalry paradigms, in which perceptual changes need not be associated with an overt movement.
Original language | English |
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Article number | niz012 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Neuroscience of Consciousness |
Volume | 5 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2019 |
Keywords
- active inference
- awareness
- Bayesian
- binocular rivalry
- Troxler fading
Projects
- 2 Finished
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The integration of perception and thought
Hohwy, J. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Bayne, T. (Chief Investigator (CI)) & Moran, R. (Chief Investigator (CI))
31/05/19 → 31/12/22
Project: Research
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Consciousness in the predictive mind
Hohwy, J. (Primary Chief Investigator (PCI)), Blankenburg, F. (Partner Investigator (PI)), Kouider, S. (Partner Investigator (PI)) & Seth, A. (Partner Investigator (PI))
ARC - Australian Research Council, Monash University, University of Sussex, Ecole Normale Superieure, Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin)
30/09/16 → 30/04/20
Project: Research