Editorial: Perception–Cognition Interface and Cross-Modal Experiences: Insights into Unified Consciousness

The present Research Topic explores closely related aspects of mental functioning, namely an interplay between perception and cognition, interactions among various sensory modalities, and finally, more or less unified conscious experiences arising in the context of these relations. Contributions emphasize a high flexibility observed in perception and may be seen as potential challenges to the traditional modular architecture of perceptual systems. Although the articles describe different phenomena, they follow one common theme—to investigate broadly understood unified experience—by studying either perception–cognition integration or the integration between sensory modalities. These integrative processes may well apply to subpersonal unconscious representations. However, the aim here is to approach phenomenal experience and thus a straightforward way of thinking about it is in terms of conscious perception. One of the seemingly principled divisions in the human mind is between sense perception and high-level cognition. Traditionally, perception and cognition have been viewed as distinct, encapsulated domains operating independently of each other although the mentioned division between perceiving and reasoning may seem conceptually clear and unambiguous, these mental domains become closely intertwined when our beliefs, expectations, or desires affect what we see, hear, or taste, leading to complex phenomenal states of a hybrid nature. No matter whether we assume that there is no dichotomy between perception and cognition (Clark, 2013; Lupyan, 2015) or instead assume that there is a principled difference and a joint in nature between perception and cognition (Block, submitted; cf. Firestone and Scholl, 2015), cognitive-sensory interactions can and need to be accommodated within any of these accounts. Perception has typically been studied in a single sense, mostly in the visual or auditory modality (Haynes et al.