Perceptual Guidance Reveals How Experiences Guide Our Focus

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Perceptual Guidance
Sebastian Watzl

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The Explosion Experience
Suppose that you are sitting at your desk and working. Suddenly there is
an explosion right outside of your window. You hear that and have a
vivid perceptual experience.

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What does the Explosion
Experience tell you?
 It tells you what there is: there is a loud, high-pitched sound to your
left.
 the experience is informing.
 It tells you what to do: “look and listen to what is happening there!”
 the experience is guiding.
 Some intuitive descriptions of perceptual guidance
 like a command to focus your attention on that sound.
 a conflict between your desire to focus on your work; you want one
thing, your experience wants otherwise.
 you feel a perceptual pull to focus attention on that sound.

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Informing and Guiding
 Informing
 Informational Function of perceptual experience.
 The function of perception is to deliver an objective representation of features in the
subject’s environment (e.g. Burge 2010).
 The rational role of perceptual experience is to rationalize perceptual beliefs.
 Informational Phenomenology of perceptual experience.
 The phenomenology of perceptual experience is or supervenes on how the world
appears to the subject of that experience (“what is (re)present(ed) to the subject”)
 Guiding
 Guiding Function of perceptual experience.
 (Part of) the function of perception is to guide the attention of the subject to salient
aspects of her surroundings.
 ? (Part of) the rational role of perceptual experience is to rationalize attending to those
salient aspects
 Guiding Phenomenology of perceptual experience
 (Part of) the phenomenology of perceptual experience is to feel your attention drawn to
various aspects of your surroundings.

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Neglecting Perceptual Guidance

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Perceptual Guidance Everywhere?
The focus seems to move relentlessly,
shimmering and fidgeting no matter how
hard we may try to concentrate on a
thought, preserve an image, or otherwise
freeze the instant. Not only does it seem
quite impossible to hold a particular
thought or percept fully in mind for an
indefinite period, it also seems futile to
attempt to keep consciousness away from
a chosen target by fixing our minds on
something else. Consciousness simply
cannot hold itself still.
Wegner 1997, p. 295

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Two Claims
Guidance
Some perceptual experiences are guiding
1. as part of their function;
2. as part of their phenomenology.
 Could also have views on which there is guidance phenomenology, but it is not perceptual.
 Could have views that accept only the functional or only the phenomenal part.
Universal Guidance
All perceptual experiences are guiding
1. as part of their function;
2. as part of their phenomenology.
 Guidance comes in degrees. Commands can have different strengths.
 Some experiences guide more, others less; but all a little bit.
 Interesting when applied to fairly fine-grained experiences (experiences of colors, color-
instances, shapes, single objects, presences, absences, ...) [more below]

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Overview
 Perceptual Guidance in Context
 Guiding attention and guiding other activities
 Perceptual Guidance and Involuntary Attention
 Perceptual Guidance and Salience
 Constraints on a theory of Perceptual Guidance
 Characteristics of Guidance
 The Integration Challenge
 How to Explain Perceptual Guidance
 The Significance of Perceptual Guidance

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Perceptual Guidance in
Context

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Just one among many?
 In Perceptual Guidance, perceptual experience guides attention. It says:
 Attend to this!
 Given a number of natural models, attention guidance might be seen as one
instance of a broader set of phenomena (“Imperative Aspects of Perceptual
Experience”):
 Do A!
 I should do A!
 A-ing is called for!
Guiding attention and guiding other
activities

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Just one among many?
 Compare also that one might think that voluntary attention is an action in the same
sense as, say, dancing, turning your head, hammering a nail in the wall, returning a
tennis ball, writing a philosophy paper:
 You can intend them, try to do them them, decide to do them, stop doing them, etc.
 There might be restrictions on what a particular subject can, say, try to do at a particular time.
But arguably these restriction are not due to the nature of trying.
 Similarly, one might think that if there is perceptual attention guidance then there
could be perceptual guidance for other activities. At least, one might think, there are
no restrictions on what perception can guide that are due to the nature of
perception.
activities

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activities
 Outside perceptual experience (in a narrow sense):
 Itch experiences as commands to scratch: scratch here! (Hall 2008)
 Pain experiences as commands to get rid of a bodily disturbance (Klein
2007, Martinez 2011)
 Note that these are fairly naturally treated as kinds of experience or
modalities. The case for the claim that either their function or their
phenomenology is exhaustively informational has never been very strong
(they were always “problem cases” for representationalists)

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activities
 Within perceptual experience (in a narrow sense):
 Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus, Cussins, Kelly.
“[I]nkstand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table,
lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room [...] never
show themselves proximally as they are for
themselves [...] The hammering itself uncovers
the specific 'manipulability' of the hammer. The
kind of Being which equipment possesses [...]
we call "readiness-to-hand". When we deal
with them by using them and manipulating
then, this activity is not a blind one; it has its
own kind of sight by which our manipulation
is guided”

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activities
[C]onsider a tennis swing. [...] if one is
expert at the game, things are going well,
and one is absorbed in the game, what
one experiences is more like one's arm
going up and its being drawn to the
appropriate position, the racket forming
the optimal angle with the court - an angle
one need not even be aware of - all this
so as to complete the gestalt made up of
the court, one's running opponent, and the
oncoming ball.

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activities
Many years ago I used to ride a motorcycle around
London [...] One time I was stopped by a
policeman, who asked me "Do you know how fast
you were travelling?” [...] I was unable to tell the
policeman my speed, yet surely I did know [...] The
speed was presented to me as a certain way of
wiggling through and around heavy traffic [...] as a
felt rotational pressure in my right hand as it held
the throttle grip [...] a felt vibration of the road and a
rush of wind, a visual rush of surfaces, a sense of
how the immediate environment would afford
certain motions and resist others

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activities
 Detachability
 All of these authors try to argue for much more than for Generalized
Perceptual Guidance:
 Heidegger: argue for a metaphysics with different modes of being.
 Dreyfus: argue for an anti-intellectualist account of know-how and skill
 Cussins: argue that experience has non-propositional, non-truth-
conditional content in whose terms we can explain propositional content
 Kelly: argue that shape perception depends on generalized guidance.
 The Generalized Guidance Claim though arguably can be detached from
these larger projects. We can consider whether it is true and how to best to
develop (if true) in independence of those larger projects.

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activities
A special one?
 Attention guidance might, though, also be special and unique:
 Suppose one is not convinced of the Heidegger, Dreyfus, Cussins examples.
One might still accept Guidance for attention.
 Maybe perceptual experience is a kind of experience that allows only for
perceptual attention guidance (while pain and itch experiences allow other
forms of guidance).
 Attention, after all, is a perceptual activity.
 Maybe the best model for attention Guidance does not generalize:
 maybe it isn’t in the end quite like an imperative, though shares some
similarities.

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activities
Reasons to focus on attention guidance
 powerful phenomenological case.
 powerful functional case.
 lots of empirical data that can guide philosophical theorizing.
 interesting consequences.

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Guidance and Involuntary Attention
 Perceptual Guidance is directly connected to involuntary
attention (arguably constitutively)
 to have a guiding experience is to “feel you attention drawn to
something” (sometimes against your will) without trying or intending to
attend.
 Involuntary attention (and with it perceptual guidance, I claim) has been the
subject of intense scientific study.

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Posner Cuing
Paradigm

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 Some general remarks about these studies.
 The cue (which attracts attention) is almost always consciously
perceived (though some recent studies, e.g. Jiang et al. 2006, suggest that there
are rare exceptions).
 The experience of the cue temporally precedes and most likely
causes focus of attention to its location.
 The features that are reliable cues, and whose experience tends to
guide attention are fairly hetereogenous and context dependent.
 In vision: color, orientation, motion, size, luminance, onset (different for
other modalities); influenced by familiarity, and prior experience
 Attention cueing is not automatic (except maybe in rare cases)

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 Yantis and Jonides (1990) asked whether attention capture is
automatic in the following sense
 “Attempts by a subject to prevent an automatic process from proceeding are
not successful”
 They call this “The Intentionality Criterion” for automaticity
 They found that attention capture is not automatic in that sense
 A voluntary cue will interfere with an involuntary cue.
 Further studies* confirmed that in the overwhelming number of cases:
 what captures attention is contingent on which task the subject is performing,
her prior experience, her goals, rewards, interests, etc
 “Contingent Capture”
* Folk, Remington and Johnston 1992; Yantis 1993; Bacon and
Egeth 1994; Yantis and Egeth 1999; Serences et al. 2005;
Folk and Remington 2006; Chen and Mordkoff 2007; Ansorge
and Horstmann 2007; Kiss et al. 2008; etc.

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 Summary:
 The conscious experience of cues draws subjects’ attention to
various aspects of her surroundings.
 That process is not directly controlled by the subject (in any sense
that would make it an intentional action).
 Yet, that process is also strongly context dependent and “in
conversation” with the subject’s overall motivational system.

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Guidance and Salience
 Despite the heterogeneity of features whose experience captures
attention, it is natural to speak of a property they have in common
when they do capture attention:
 What captures attention is salient, and does so in virtue of being
salient.

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Notions of Salience
 Feature Salience. Probably best viewed as a relational property, i.e.
the property shared by all those properties, objects that are salient to a
certain perceiver in a certain perceptual context given a certain
background and certain goals.
 only what is currently perceived is feature salient.
 arguably comes in degrees.
 Statistical Salience. “Explosions (in general) are salient events.” Natural
to understand in terms of perceptual salience: entity e is statistically
salient just in case in normal conditions N entity e would be
perceptually salient to a class of perceivers C to a sufficiently high
degree d.
 often shows up in explanation: why did they meet at the fountain? Because it
was such a salient object on the otherwise empty square.

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Notions of Salience
 Generalized Feature Salience. Generalization from perceptual
salience to non-perceptual cases: options, ideas, solutions might be
salient (for a subject) in a situation. When they are they capture the
subject’s attention.
 Phenomenal Salience. A phenomenal property of experiences (not of
mind-independent objects).
 An experience e of x is phenomenally salient in situation s iff x is
perceptually salient in s.

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Proposal
 The class of attention guiding experiences is the class of
phenomenally salient experiences.
 An experience is attention guiding in virtue of being phenomenally
salient.
 Will need to answer what is explanatorily prior: phenomenal salience
or feature salience?
 are phenomenally salient experiences attention guiding primarily because of
some property of the experience or primarily because of a property a feature
is experienced to have?

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Constraints on a theory of
perceptual guidance

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 Guiding experience (=phenomenally salient experiences) play a a
certain causal role
 They cause a perceptual state with a certain focus of attention.
 They do so directly: the causal chain doesn’t go through the subject’s
desires, intentions, etc.
 Which properties of guiding experience are relevant for that causal
role?
 Two options: phenomenal properties or non-phenomenal properties
 Arguably, the relevant properties are the phenomenal properties, in
particular: phenomenal salience.
 It is part of the nature of guiding experiences that they play this causal
role
 what it is to be that kind of experience entails playing that causal role.
 Comparable to itch experiences.
Characteristics of Perceptual
Guidance

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Causal Role
Guiding experiences as part of their nature directly cause and causally sustain
the focus of attention to be centered on the objects of those experiences in
virtue of their phenomenal properties.
Guidance

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Sense-Making
 Consider what Dreyfus (2005, p.13) says about perceptual action guidance
“It seems that, either one is pushed around like a thing by meaningless physical and
psychological forces, or else one’s reasons, explicit or implicit, motivate one’s actions [...]
“Merleau-Ponty faces this challenge by introducing a third way one can be led to cope - a
way he calls motivation. This is not a psychological concept for him but a perceptual one.”
 The rough idea here, I take it, is that perceptually guided activities in some way
“make-sense” from the subject’s point of view – even though they are not
intentional actions, not directly controlled by her reasons.
 Perceptually guided attention (when attention is captured by what is feature
salient) has some features that makes it natural to also put it in such an
intermediary category:
 Caused and causally sustained by the instantiation of certain phenomenal properties.
 Responsive to the subject’s motivational system.
Guidance

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Sense-Making
Guiding experiences make (subjective) sense of the focus of attention to be
centered on the objects of those experience.
Note:
 The intuitive datum of sense-making is not extremely clear. So, it’s not very
clear what exactly a philosophical theory of perceptual guidance has to
accomodate.
Guidance

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 Any account of perceptual guidance has to meet what I shall call “The
Integration Challenge”
 This is the challenge of integrating the guiding aspect of perceptual
experience with its informing aspect:
 How can perceptual experience be both like an imperative and like an
assertion?
 How can experience be in some way like belief and in some way like an
intention?
The Integration Challenge

+ How to Explain Perceptual
Guidance

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Models of Perceptual Guidance
Building Block Models
The explosion experience has two parts, an informing part and a guiding
part. It is the mereological sum of these to parts.
 The informing part has a mind-to-world direction of fit, the guiding part a world-to-
mind direction of fit.
 The explosion experience = experientially-believe <this is loud and left> +
experientially-desire <attending to this>
 Analogy: being please that p = believing that p + desiring that p.
 Advantage
 easy to fit into a standard Humean picture that maintains fundamental divisions
between motivational and non-motivational states.
 Disadvantages
 can’t seem to explain the unity of the explosion experience.
 hard to see why perceptual guidance deserves to be called “perceptual”

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Descriptive Content Models
The explosion experience represents <the explosion is loud, to the left
and feature salient>
 Phenomenal salience gets explained by feature salience.
 Feature salience might be a simple or relational property. It is
experienced, but possibly nothing has it.
 Advantage
 easy to explain the unity of the explosion experience
 Fits into standard representationalist accounts of perceptual experience
 Disadvantages
 Can’t explain why the causal role of guiding experiences is essential to them
 Can’t provide any plausible account of sense-making

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Normative Content Models
The explosion experience represents <the explosion is loud, to your left
and to be attended>
 Different ways of understanding “to-be-doneness” (see Susanna’s talk)
 moral, prudential, primitive
 To-be-doneness might be relational (“by me now”)
 Advantage
 easy to explain the unity of the explosion experience
 Fits into (fairly) standard representationalist accounts of perceptual experience
 Can explain why the causal role of guiding experiences is essential to them
 Can provide a plausible account of sense-making

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Normative Content Models
The explosion experience represents <the explosion is loud, to your left
and to be attended>
 Disadvantages
 not clear what exactly these normative properties are.
 not clear that these normative properties are naturalistically kosher.
 not clear that it gets the direction of explanation right.
 Compare non-cognitivism about normative judgments (when you judge that
such-and-such is to be done you express a certain attitude). The attitudes here
are explanatorily prior to the representation of a normative property (e.g.
Gibbard 2003)
 Same here: arguably it is because phenomenally salient experiences are a
certain kind of state that attending is experienced as to be done, not the other
way around.

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Imperative Content Model
The explosion experience represents <the explosion is loud and to the
left, and attend to it!>
 Advantages
 Arguably all of the ones of the normative content model.
 No need for normative properties.
 Need an account of imperative contents that fits with perceptual
imperatives.
 salience also causally sustains the focus of attention.
 the subject’s preferences arguably do not shift even when she is attending to
what is salient (“I still prefer attending to my work to attending to that #$?
explosion!”

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One way to develop the imperative content model
 Think of imperative contents as dynamic contents
 not a set of accuracy conditions, but a rule for updating your mental
state.
 The update rule take you from an experience with the current focus of
attention to an experience with a different focus of attention
 The account is compatible with understanding the focus of attention in a number of
different ways. For present purposes think of attention as prioritization: it orders or ranks
the various parts of a subject’s experience
Higher attentional
priority

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Explosion
Experience
Attending to the
Explosion

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 An alternative: the rule prescribes a change in the preference
ranking (see Starr forthcoming) so that attending to the explosion is
now preferred.
 Seems implausible to me in light of the above.
 Shouldn’t try to force a theory of involuntary attention (arguably a fairly simple system) into
a mold devised for more complex phenomena (we should, though, keep their similarities in
sight.

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 Can include both re-ordering of the attention state (when what becomes
salient is already perceived) or introduction of a new element (which was
not perceived before).
 Must develop an account of explaining the force of the imperative
 If that can be done, then we might get universal guidance.

+ The Significance of
Perceptual Guidance

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 A quick way of re-prioritizing that side-steps the complex
evaluation that comes with central processing.
 Sensitivity to the agents motivational system let’s the agent
integrate sensitivity to the current situation with her overall
goals and concerns.
 Without it the informing function of perception would be
compromised:
 information overflow if everything (whether attended or not) would
be used for further processing.
 sever limits to learning if further processing were limited to what is
voluntary attended.
Why is perceptual experience
guiding?

Perceptual Guidance Reveals How Experiences Guide Our Focus

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