Improving perception to make distant connections closer

Abstract

One of the challenges for perceptually grounded accounts of high-level cognition is to explain how people make connections and draw inferences between situations that super- ficially have little in common. Evidence suggests that people draw these connections even without having explicit, verbalizable knowledge of their bases. Instead, the connections are based on sub-symbolic representations that are grounded in perception, action, and space. One reason why people are able to spontaneously see relations between situations that initially appear to be unrelated is that their eventual perceptions are not restricted to initial appearances. Training and strategic deployment allow our perceptual processes to deliver outputs that would have otherwise required abstract or formal reasoning. Even with- out people having any privileged access to the internal operations of perceptual modules, these modules can be systematically altered so as to better serve our high-level reason- ing needs. Moreover, perceptually based processes can be altered in a number of ways to closely approximate formally sanctioned computations. To be concrete about mecha- nisms of perceptual change, we present 21 illustrations of ways in which we alter, adjust, and augment our perceptual systems with the intention of having them better satisfy our needs. © 2011 Goldstone, Landy and Brunel.