Abstract
In this chapter, I defend the thesis that early vision is Cognitively Impenetrable (CI) against very recent criticisms, some of them aimed specifically at my arguments, which state that neurophysiological evidence shows that early vision is affected in a top-down manner by cognitive states. This criticism comes from (a) studies on fast object recognition; (b) pre-cueing studies; and (c) imaging studies that examine the recurrent processes in the brain during visual perception. I argue that upon closer examination, all this evidence supports rather than defeats the thesis that early vision is CI, because it shows that (a) the information used in early vision to recognize objects very fast is not cognitive information; (b) the processes of early vision do not use the cognitive information that issues cognitive demands guiding attention or expectation in pre-cueing studies; and (c) the recurrent processes in early vision are purely stimulus-driven and do not involve any cognitive signals.
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Notes
- 1.
Shorter latencies of signal transmission have been reported by Innui and Kakigi (2006) who applied flash stimuli to the right eye and examined activations in eight cortical areas and found out that the cortico-cortical connection time of visual processing at the early stage was 4–6 ms. Even with this temporal profile of activation, there is still time for recurrent signals from hMT to affect V1 because they reenter V1 in about 20 ms, which is well within the time window of the first 100 ms after the initial activation of the V1 neurons.
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Raftopoulos, A. (2019). Early Vision and Cognitive Penetrability. In: Cognitive Penetrability and the Epistemic Role of Perception. Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10445-0_3
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