Expertise in object recognition, as in bird watching or X-ray specialization, is based on extensive perceptual experience and in-depth semantic knowledge. Although it has been shown that rich perceptual experience shapes elementary perception and higher level discrimination and identification, little is known about the influence of in-depth semantic knowledge on object perception and identifica...

Perceptual interfaces defined from a human perspective suggest similar topics (for example, vision, hearing, speech, touch), but radically different ideas about how sensory experience works and about how machines might change or facilitate human perception. The goal of a human-centered look at perceptual interfaces is to transform the world of computers into features of sensory experience that ...

The animal kingdom contains species with a wide variety of sensory systems that have been selected to function in different environmental niches, but that are also subject to modification by experience during an organism's lifetime. The modification of such systems by experience is often called perceptual learning. In rodents, the classic example of perceptual learning is the observation that s...

Although the field of perceptual learning has mostly been concerned with low- to middle-level changes to perceptual systems due to experience, we consider high-level perceptual changes that accompany learning in science and mathematics. In science, we explore the transfer of a scientific principle (competitive specialization) across superficially dissimilar pedagogical simulations. We argue tha...

To what extent is our perceptual experience influenced by higher cognitive phenomena like beliefs, desires, concepts, templates? Given recent arguments against the possibility of cognitive penetration, we present striking evidence against the impenetrability claims. The weak impenetrability claim cannot account for (1) extensive structural feedback organization of the brain, (2) temporally very...

How does the developing brain respond to recent experience? Repetition suppression (RS) is a robust and well-characterized response of to recent experience found, predominantly, in the perceptual cortices of the adult brain. We use functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate how perceptual (temporal and occipital) and frontal cortices in the infant brain respond to auditory and...

The literature contains a disconnect between accounts of how humans learn lexical semantic representations for words. Theories generally propose that lexical semantics are learned either through perceptual experience or through exposure to regularities in language. We propose here a model to integrate these two information sources. Specifically, the model uses the global structure of memory to ...

The sensorimotor theory of perceptual consciousness offers a form of enactivism in that it stresses patterns of interaction instead of any alleged internal representations of the environment. But how does it relate to forms of enactivism stressing the continuity between life and mind (and more particularly autopoiesis, autonomy, and valence)? We shall distinguish sensorimotor enactivism, which ...

Perceptual learning as a phenomenon. We are all of us experts. Each one of us is able to effortlessly distinguish between a large number of people that we encounter in our everyday lives. When considered as stimuli in the abstract this is a difficult discrimination task as the stimuli are all rather similar to one another, yet we can identify an individual in a moment with an accuracy that woul...

Human perception is shaped by past experience on multiple timescales. Sudden and dramatic changes in perception occur when prior knowledge or expectations match stimulus content. These immediate effects contrast with the longer-term, more gradual improvements that are characteristic of perceptual learning. Despite extensive investigation of these two experience-dependent phenomena, there is con...