Prediction plays a key role in control of attention but it is not clear which aspects of prediction are most prominent in conscious experience. An evolving view on the brain is that it can be seen as a prediction machine that optimizes its ability to predict states of the world and the self through the top-down propagation of predictions and the bottom-up presentation of prediction errors. Ther...

CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not. Abstract Experience with visual stimuli can improve their perceptual performance, a phenomenon termed visual perceptual learning (VPL), but how does VPL shape our conscious experience of learned stimuli? VPL has been found to improve meas...

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Many modern goods have both factual and perceptual features. While factual features such as technical specifications can easily be handled by existing database technology, perceptual features such as design or usage experience are very hard to deal with. However, with the huge success and growing market share of online shopping, retailers face the need to provided detailed and structured inform...

Looking at ambiguous figures results in rivalry with spontaneous alternation between two percepts. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we localized transient human brain activity changes during perceptual reversals. Activation occurred in ventral occipital and intraparietal higher-order visual areas, deactivation in primary visual cortex and the pulvinar. Thus, without an...

The extent to which auditory experience can shape general auditory perceptual abilities is still under constant debate. Some studies show that specific auditory expertise may have a general effect on auditory perceptual abilities, while others show a more limited influence, exhibited only in a relatively narrow range associated with the area of expertise. The current study addresses this issue ...

Perceptual experience seems to involve distinct intentional and qualitative features. Inasmuch as one can visually perceive that there is a Coke can in front of one, perceptual experience must be intentional. But such experiences seem to differ from paradigmatic intentional states in having introspectible qualitative character. Peacocke (1983) argues that a perceptual experience s qualitative c...

There is a well-known line of thought, associated with Donald Davidson, that connects the notion of a perceptual given—of non-linguistic or non-conceptual experience of the world—with skepticism. Against this, I argue that the notion of what is given in perception leads to skepticism only on certain interpretations. I argue, in fact, that there must be perceptual experience such that there is “...

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view (CV). There is debate within (CV) concerning the extent to which such content captures the subjective nature of experience; and, indeed, th...

When we view visual images in everyday life, our perception is oriented toward object identification. In contrast, when viewing visual images as artworks, we also tend to experience subjective reactions to their stylistic and structural properties. This experiment sought to determine how cognitive control and perceptual facilitation contribute to aesthetic perception along with the experience o...