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Insight: Neuroscientific investigations of knowledge effects on visual perception and awareness

Subject Area General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term from 2012 to 2022
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 221029803
 
Final Report Year 2023

Final Report Abstract

What influence does our knowledge have on how we perceive and judge the world around us? The results of this project paint a clear picture of how declarative knowledge affects perceptionrelated processes. Socio-emotional information about individuals, functional information about objects, social information about artists, as well as long-established knowledge related to our native language influence how we perceive and judge social stimuli like faces or deepfake faces and emotional facial expressions, as well as objects, artworks, and even color contrasts. In addition to these basic components of perception, other perception-related functions are influenced by our knowledge. Specifically, the various types of knowledge described above can facilitate the access of these different object categories to visual consciousness. This is associated with altered brain activity in early time ranges between 100 and 300 milliseconds. Hence, knowledge not only alters how we perceive our environment but also determines which aspects of our environment actually enter our consciousness in the first place. Even in the case of visual mental imagery, parallels to visual perception can be found in very early processing components, as well as similar effects of knowledge on perception and imagination. For instance, imagining an emotional facial expression is accompanied by a similar pattern of event-related brain activity in the EEG as perceiving neutral faces when they are associated with socio-emotional knowledge, and when facial expressions are actually perceived. Further, similar to visually presented objects, where knowledge effects can be observed in the amplitude of the P1 component, approximately after 100 milliseconds, such early effects are also present in the P1 component during the mental visualization of objects. The findings of this project together indicate that knowledge can significantly influence our perceptual experiences, our consciousness, imagination, and our judgments. This is particularly true when processing is difficult, such as when visual stimulation is absent, as in mental imagery, or under conditions of reduced attention, when conscious perception is difficult. Particularly in these situations, knowledge may guide our perception. The project's findings are inconsistent with the assumption of perception being isolated from higher cognitive functions; rather, they suggest that knowledge can have both immediate top-down effects on perception and modulate stored object representations. In this sense, our perception can be described as intelligent.

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