“ Top - down ” effects where none should be found :

120 words) A tidal wave of recent research purports to have discovered that higher-level states such as moods, action-capabilities, and categorical knowledge can literally and directly affect what we see. Are these truly effects on perception, or might some instead reflect influences on judgment, memory, or response bias? Here, we exploit an infamous art-historical reasoning error (the socalled “El Greco fallacy”) to demonstrate in five experiments that multiple alleged top-down effects (ranging from effects of morality on lightness perception to effects of action capabilities on spatial perception) cannot truly be effects on perception. We suggest that this error may also contaminate several other varieties of top-down effects, and that this discovery has implications for debates over the (dis)continuity of perception and cognition.